I Might Have Dreamed This

Kirsten Dierking

For a short time after

the rape, I found I could

move things. Energy birds

swarmed from my brain.

With a witch's sense

of abandoned physics,

I set dolls rolling.

Back and forth. Like a

breathing sound.

Using only my night-powered

eyes, I pushed the lamp

to the dresser's edge.

I buried the mirrors

in avalanches of freshly

laundered underpants.

I never slept.

I did all these things

lying down.

From One Red Eye by Kirsten Dierking. Copyright © 2001 by Kirsten Dierking. Used by permission of Holy Cow! Press. All rights reserved.

Further Reading

		Dreams
		Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake] by Christina Rossetti
		The Book of a Thousand Eyes [A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding] by Lyn Hejinian
		A Bedtime Story For Mr. Lamb by Arthur Nevis
		A Book Said Dream and I Do by Barbara Ras
		A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe
		Bedside by William Olsen
		Counting by Douglas Goetsch
		Cradle Song by William Blake
		Darkness by George Gordon Byron
		Dear Tiara by Sean Thomas Dougherty
		Dream In Which I Meet Myself by Lynn Emanuel
		Dream of the Evil Servant by Reetika Vazirani
		Dream Song 1 by John Berryman
		Dream Variations by Langston Hughes
		Dreaming About My Father by Ed Ochester
		Flying by Sarah Arvio
		Grasshopper by Ron Padgett
		He Dreams of Falling by Ruth Ellen Kocher
		His Heart by Caroline Knox
		I am Like a Desert Owl, an Owl Among the Ruins by Noelle Kocot
		it was a dream by Lucille Clifton
		Japanese Lullaby by Eugene Field
		Kristin's Dream In November by Bernadette Mayer
		Last by Maxine Scates
		Lullaby of an Infant Chief by Sir Walter Scott
		Making the Bed by Burt Kimmelman
		Nocturne by Wayne Miller
		O Little Root of a Dream by Paul Celan
		Our eunuch dreams by Dylan Thomas
		Prologue of the Earthly Paradise by William Morris
		Raven's Last Dream by Red Hawk
		Scarecrow on Fire by Dean Young
		The Dream of the Just by Dana Gelinas
		The Good-Morrow by John Donne
		The House by Richard Wilbur
		The Land of Nod by Robert Louis Stevenson
		The Republic of Dreams by Michael Palmer
		The Sandman by Margaret Thomson Janvier
		The Sleepers by Walt Whitman
		The Song in the Dream by Saskia Hamilton
		The Tower by W. B. Yeats
		Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood
		Wynken, Blynken, and Nod by Eugene Field