Dreams

Jessica Young
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The scary ones are the familiar ones. Not the ones where some large, slick reptile appears in our basement and tries to have me for a snack, no, not the ones where I am asked to land the airplane and put us all down in the jungle. Not those, but the ones where it is dark, but nothing happens. The ones where I eat every piece of food I can find and still feel hungry. The ones where Alice falls down the shallow well behind our house and could get out herself but doesn’t, and I’m too distracted to notice for hours; by the time I realize it is too late and though we bring her body back up and though her skin and dress are unharmed, unmarked, by the fullness of her eyes it is obvious the ground will never seem as solid. Those, and the ones where I try to run, and I do, but in slow motion, as if my body is encased in honey.

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Jessica Young’s Pushcart-nominated work has appeared most recently in Copper Nickel, Versal, and Cold Moutain Review. She held the Zell Fellowship for poetry in Ann Arbor, MI after completing her MFA (poetry) at the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwoods and the 2010 Moveen Residency. Her undergraduate work was at MIT.