Tuesday poem #330 : Samuel Ace : Every morning I wait for a pouch of dreams

Every morning I wait for a pouch of dreams   the scrabblings of birds and all the rushings by   my parents call from two different corners of the room   suddenly dead   martyrs in the stories of their recent lives   my mother lives in a new house   she tells me she loves the windows that look out to the sea   she shows me her kitchen   far messier than the one she had before   my father   singing and bald at twenty-five   shovels dirt or coal   I hum along with him but I’m not sure he hears   I ask my mother if she’s seen my sisters   Who? she shouts   all the hairs!   all the mouths!   she does not know the tall rangy man in overalls   my father   gone before she knows him   as he walks down a path near the river   where the after-life happens before it can be caught   where the life before is a dog or a fly or a portrait on the wall   my sisters stroll through the center of the room   one has a broken arm   the other a cane and a limp   I run to them and hide beneath their matching rose velvet gowns   I sing my father’s song up through their ribs and hear an orchestra of breathing tubes   rabbits on the floor   a hint of lime   eggs scrambling in an iron pan   I see a block of marble where the wind   a drum in the grass   a grave of killers   rises and wanders toward morning through the dark  

Samuel Ace [photo credit: Matthew Blank] Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), the re-issued Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash., (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Vinyl, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. www.samuelace.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan