In the Dream by Jenny Johnson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 27, 2016   In the Dream   Jenny Johnson

I was alone in a dyke bar we’d traversed before or maybe it was in a way all our dives   merging together suddenly as one intergalactic composite, one glitter-spritzed black hole,   one cue stick burnished down to a soft blue nub. Picture an open cluster of stars   managing to forever stabilize in space without a landlord scheming to shut the place down.   Anyways, I was searching for someone there whom we hadn’t seen in years—in what   could have been Sisters, Babes, the Lex, the Pint, the Palms, or the E Room? but the room   had no end and no ceiling. Though I could see all of our friends or exes   with elbows up or fingers interlocked on table tops zinging with boomerangs.   Maybe the tables were spinning, too. I can’t be sure. But just as a trap that trips before   hammering a mouse is not humane the dream changed—or the alarm   that I carry in my breast pocket in my waking life was sounding. Because in the dream,   three people on bar stools, who were straight or closeted? but more importantly angry   turned and the room dwindled like a sweater full of moths eating holes   through wool. Or they were humans, sure, but not here to love   with jawlines set to throw epithets like darts that might stick or knick or flutter past   as erratically as they were fired.  You could say their hostility was a swirl   nebulous as gas and dust, diffuse as the stress   a body meticulously stores. Like how when I was shoved in grade school   on the blacktop in my boy jeans the teacher asked me if I had a strawberry   because the wound was fresh as jam, glistening like pulp does after the skin of a fruit is   peeled back clean with a knife. I was in the dream as open to the elements,   yet I fired back. And I didn’t care who eyed me like warped metal to be pounded square.   I said: Do you realize where you are?   And with one finger I called our family forth and out of the strobe lights, they came.            Copyright © 2016 Jenny Johnson. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Three of the historic lesbian bars I mention in ‘In the Dream’—Sisters, the Lex, and the Palms—have recently closed their doors. So on one hand, ‘In the Dream’ is a narrative of solidarity in the face of homophobia, but also the poem is importantly a dream, a fantasy of a space where queer lives and experiences are foregrounded.” —Jenny Johnson   Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and lives in Pittsburgh.       "Atlantic Elegy" by Julie Marie Wade "Populating Heaven" by Maureen N. McLane from "Late Summer" by Deborah Landau Poems on the Air   Every weekday at 6 p.m. (EST) during National Poetry Month, New York’s classical music station WQXR 105.9 FM will feature a special reading of a poem from the Poem-a-Day series. Tune in or visit wqxr.org. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038