After Release & Insomnia

Abstract

After Release & Insomnia Dana Curtis (bio) After Release The gate opens on nothingwe can remember seeingalone on our journey here.I have to say goodbyenow because there will be no moremusic or landscapespainted on velvet. It’s50 cents at my final garage sale.We are wound aroundthese ethereal yet basicimages—I am just asforgotten as I ever was.The gate shudders and creeks;the ocean crouches at my feet;we were never anythingbut a figment of an unlivedmemory. It’s all tooephemeral and vibrant.We know it’s what we alwayswanted. Clandestine,we sneak small glances throughgoldplated bars. We can smellsomething cooking, and we don’tknow what it could be. We are notsure we want it but crawlthrough a hole in the purple ivied wall.This might be our home.This might be the moon or Pluto. [End Page 24] Or whatever planet might be mostconvenient. The path to the seahas been eaten by roses,has been buried byangry bees. Out in the street,broken furniture confrontsempty yards, dust, and blowing paper.The gate calls to us;we hide our eyes anddream of night. [End Page 25] Insomnia Curled on a couch, wrapped inseaweed and crystalline pastimes,the alkali like so many horsesdead in the dry reservoir, I turnedthe weather away from the fingersand birds. This might be the endof all sympathy, the terminusof our voyage into the basementwhere I construct replicas andinsinuations. The pipes sing to meabout everything I used to know,nothing I remember, and nowI am barefoot on the train tracks.I remove a splinter from a mirror.There was movement under the bed.I was careful to interrupt the nightmareuntil the water rose to my neck,and I could hear the bellsbusy in the furnace. [End Page 26] Dana Curtis DANA CURTIS’s third full-length collection of poetry, Wave Particle Duality, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2017. Her second collection, Camera Stellata, was published by CW Books, and her first book, The Body’s Response to Famine, won the Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Elixir Press and lives in Denver, Colorado. I spent my childhood reading every fairy tale I could get my hands on. As I’ve grown older, and as “happily ever after” seems less likely, they have become that much more important. We need our fairy tales. We need our mythology and fantasy. As we read and interpret, it becomes even more important. I can’t escape fairy tales, and why would I want to? Our beautiful, dark stories have influenced my poetry and my life—although I’m not sure exactly how to define either. Original fairy tales are almost always dark and frightening, and it is only by confronting this that we defeat what is dark and frightening in the real world. Of course, the interpretation of the “real world” is often more challenging than any story we choose to tell. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press, Leonard N. Simons Building