Family with Dreams Cut Out
        after Bridget Lowe

The dream is not the anger, real as a dream, but what I did with it.

The dream is the only way in. The dream is I am my father.

The dream is I am not. Counting as I wash my hands

the fifth, sixth, the seventh time. I want to be kind.

The dream is cruel as my mind is cruel in its fear of cruelty.

As the oldest child the dream was that I was neither

the mother nor the father. But I kept losing my children.

We left town. We forgot to remember our brother.

Then the sister left too, ingested by the sky as a dying storm.

The dream is a childhood levitation.

I rose, I started the car, I knew the hospital route by heart.

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Copyright © 2022 Jenny Molberg All rights reserved
from Southern Indiana Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission