Afterimage

Abstract

Afterimage Chelsea Wagenaar (bio) Keywords Chelsea, Wagenaar, night, dream, red, mother, balloon, sparrow She trembles toward me in the night, my bed her beacon through the black sea of hallway between our rooms. She comes to tell me her dreams, the bad ones, nightgowned narrator of frightening nonsense scenes. She is as pilgrim as the red balloon snared in our front maple that will float, eventually, out of sight— anther and filament seeking other air. The first of many ascents: see the balloon rise to the sea's surface as red speck in the belly of a spotted lanternfish who will mistake it for plankton. As a child I learned my mother and I share a recurring nightmare— so even those are heirloom. Of all I have to leave my children, what dream can I rescind? The one in which the swallows and sparrows vanish? In which refugee children weep into backpacks, row after row of them? In which fish digest balloons and churches go up in smoke and refrigerated trucks wait in the parking lots of hospitals for the bodies to be carried out? This year I can't stop waking my love at night because my dreams keep sending him away. After her tearful recitation, I send my daughter back to bed. This year, as every year, the trees bide the winter in their proper fast, frost-stricken in imposed deafness [End Page 302] In this way they never wake in the wrong light. In this way they dream the secret dreams of trees while inside I gently shake him awake. Hear that? How quiet the yard, the street. Her footsteps almost back to her bed. Where are the feather figures who once were singing in the leaves? [End Page 303] Chelsea Wagenaar chelsea wagenaar is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently The Spinning Place, winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Prize. Her first collection, Mercy Spurs the Bone, was selected by Philip Levine to win the 2013 Philip Levine Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of North Texas and teaches in Indiana. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review and Nimrod. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.