You were alive.  You tongued me open as if looking for some pit, but instead tasted sea salt and the sweet apple harvest of my blood.  There was a fair or a boulevard or a front yard, a new haircut or a nice dress.  It could have been anything.  What would you have wanted in your hand, in my dream? I hope you didn’t want me to keep it.  What I wanted was your hand, that feeling of skin and warm.  I wanted your smell of pinion and sage, that grit of sand forever in your hair, that sun stealing opal from your eyes.

Or maybe you never existed.   I am not mouthed open but pulled, a lobster box reeled in.  I am dripping chum inside, the poison of a seed, and of course the sea, like air.  Everything is blueblack, I think I must be underwater, drowning in myself; Death is a shark but where are you?

One theory is that if the dead visits a dream and speaks, it’s merely the brain’s want for that person, the sleeper’s fabrication.  If the dead communicates only through signs, the soul has infiltrated the dream, the dreamer.  You were never one for words; in my dreams you might be a clean sheet, a can of Tecate. That brightness held between the moon and a snow-covered field in the desert, or maybe the snowflakes marring my vision as I pedal through, lit by them.

Death is a myth and somewhere you are standing by your pickup truck, maybe by the bowling alley or in that gravel lot by the farmer’s market where I tore apart my leg.  You are alone but in some angle of your eye I am next to you.  We lean against the truck bed, admiring its blue, its ability to contain.

Carolyne Whelan received her MFA in poetry and nonfiction at Chatham University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Now, Eclectica, and Chapter & Verse, among others, as well as in a collaborative chapbook, Are You Free? (Glass Key Press, 2009).  Her poetry has recently won an award from the Sacramento Poetry Center. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is the editor of the fledgling chapbook press, Longshore Press, while also working as a freelance writer and performer.