Or How With Each Dream She'd Feel Closer to the Receding Shoreline
        After Salvation, by Kara Williams

When first thing in the morning, I look into the mirror it's as though my nightmare were a mirror in which I'm about to drown: I see myself hanging onto a huge trunk submerged in the marsh. I keep trying night after night to cross the threshold separating me from the other shore, the one my mother's mother's great grandmother left bound in chains and like so many others kept staring aimlessly in the direction of her birthplace. Every night, I'm bound by my mother's recurrent dream, that must have been inbred or hereditary, passed on by word of mouth, or was it an imprint into the cell's memory that sent her dreams of being chased by winding lianas lassoing the surface of the swamp, water rising in crested waves spitting up fish into the nearby cattails, trees bending ever lower to catch her with their low tangled branches, their eyes glowing in the dark? She knew there would be at least one path leading her to safety like those who had succeeded before her, although with each dream she'd feel closer to the receding shoreline, she'd hopelessly remain trapped in the wetlands, though at times, she'd wake up from the murky waters where she was left for dead holding onto a broken trunk singing her way out like a diva.

Tweet
Copyright © 2021 Hedy Habra All rights reserved
from The Bitter Oleander
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission