Beautiful Dreamer

Mercedes Lawry

Winter is lyric perverse.  Plain gray sky, a lesson of effects.  The trouble with sleep is emptiness, as if nothing else waited by the bed.  A lapse of memory is hardly an excuse, as if the party had died into ash, silence, whatever real communication was seen as false, in the end.  In the end, it’s a haunting phrase.  We take it to mean death, or just the conclusion to a story.  Not sure, after all, that anything is different or specific.  The simpler the tale, the easier to muddle.  Snow fails to come and this indicates?  Couldn’t say, wouldn’t dare to speculate.  The scientists never see the plain gray sky.  They dance within the white walls, the gleaming calculations.  It’s worth a little envy, just a little.  Too few verbs, that’s really winter.  Hibernate, inoculate, investigate.  The house plants.  The cat nap.  Beautiful dreamer.

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Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, and Harpur Palate. Thrice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she’s published two chapbooks. Her manuscript Small Measures was selected for the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press and will be published in 2018. She was a finalist for the 2017 Airlie Press Prize and the 2017 Wheelbarrow Press Book Prize. She’s also published short fiction, essays as well as stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.