Four dream poems by Nate Maxson

Excavation

Before my lips turn blue from the altitude
I’ll speak a preemptive testament
Ahead of schedule:
The eyes of the dead in the sky
How they named the constellations

It’s an excavation
Those you remember
And those you don’t
All digging into the earth together
All night, a thousand feet down

Nothing haunts us
Like the myth of the myth
What we’re interested in
Why everything rusts
Just keep digging
Down and down:
The machinery in heat atremble

Notes On The Taxonomy Of Dreaming

Cockroaches die on their backs
As if dreaming
I’m getting suspicious of this
As mine come on like the vapors
Here are two interesting
Artifacts of note

In the first
I’m a woman living on a vaguely Hawaiian island with her mother
All flat grass but every night a forest springs up and disappears come morning
One day masked men break into the house and force feed my mother small razorblades until she vomits blood and dies
I get a little bit of it on my white dress, I do not attempt to wipe it off
In a state of grief I walk into the deepest part of the sundown thickets and disappear with them at dawn
I’ll leave the inanely Freudian interpretations of these things to you

The next dream I would like to relate
Consists of this:
I am a prisoner in a concentration camp, but I’m privileged because I’m allowed to be a janitor and clean the offices
Somehow I am given knowledge of the future, I see myself lauded as a hero for placing bombs on the road outside and destroying many tanks and freeing many prisoners
Not wanting to sacrifice myself, I hide in the laundry basket to plot my escape
They pile towels on me and I have difficulty breathing for a bit
I am taken to a large, green place where the light is fading
Like an American park you can find in any city
Left alone, I hop out
And proceed to run across it
But as I approach
My vanishing point again
Something tugs at me
I turn around and begin to return to my predicted duty
My paradox approaching fulfillment

Now,
If I told you
That all dreams
Were the same dream
Except for this one
What would you say?
Because me? Well,
I just lie on my back here
Legs twitching in the air
Metamorphosed on a rhythm
And preparing
To go dark
When the fever suits me

To Sleep Perchance To Swim

I thought this was supposed to be the dream-season
When we float away
Instead the dark ocean churns back
Shipwrecked objets d’artifice,
Commencement speeches,
Creation myths
The dark ocean sings

First I had to sharpen my teeth down to points of starlight
With nothing else to gather rhythm
This is what makes you strong

It’s instrument, the river
The hint of an artery
A far off gleam
Like a diamond mine
Evaporating

To the bone for a hundred years
A flood as rumor
But not here
Across the water where the trees don’t grow

Eight Frames From The Golden Age Of Monsters

1
I preserve the assumption of time since we began to record its motions
Which was quite recently
Digging through the dumpster
Someday
The find of the century
London after midnight
Before that there was fog stretching out forever
We didn’t know where it ended
The myth of gravity

2
They used to called Lon Chaney “the man of a thousand faces”
Back in what’s sometimes referred to as the golden age of Hollywood
His son Lon Chaney Jr is mostly remembered as The Wolfman
It’s always that one role, like a black hole: the faceless and the bandaged circle
It swallows them eventually, the hairy face in the mirror

3
Has anyone else noticed all the dead birds lately?
I’ve never actually seen one drop from the sky
Their corpses litter the sidewalks
And vanish within hours
You never see what takes them either

4
In my dream I walk across the water like Christ
But very slowly, to a wedding at the end of the world
White and blue expanse, I ambled nervously like a satellite to some bright event
Sometimes the shapes of orcas and sharks fluttered beneath me
By the time I got there it was probably a divorce

5
Our elliptical orbit, up here: winged sleepwalkers
It allows the intimation of a return, like clear glass not seen until impact
Are we flightless wolves or strips of amber film in motion?
It’s a full moon tonight
Father and son blurred into a visage of light in time
Illusory,
We approach with something akin to nostalgia

6
I never lived through any golden age
Though they often seem to appear
In hindsight
Like the bones of horses
And rusted automobiles
Come a thaw
The future
Think of all the abandoned hotels and hospitals
Wonderful
That we could leave behind on Mars

7
There’s a hole in the center of the last century
Too late to plug it up, cease its gravity
It’s still sucking at our tips like wind
Towards its center
They say that if you reach
That place
Where there’s no light in the sky
And the children play in the streets all night
They’ll put your name in a star
Fly on phantom: sprout wings, give me a miracle
Give me something to howl at
Like all red blooded Americans
I have some degree of apocalypse-fetish
A slapstick routine preferably
A skin tight reflex
Translucent cocoon like a plastic bag
Somewhere underneath
I remember every face that I ever tossed away
The reflex circles the fire pit
“The ash heap of history” someone once said, probably while smoking a cigarette
Embering out slowly into smoke and distance
We take flight, blindly at the center
Heat seeking missile children
Aimed like cold saints
Curators of vicarious remembrance, fly on
Because the future won’t wait forever for the likes of you and me

8
So the golden age of monsters begins so slowly
You don’t notice
You’re surrounded
Until they take off their masks
The other side of silver, luminous memory
Photoretinal burn marks in the lightless but only implied penitentiary
Scratch on the wall
Like this
Eventually they’ll let us out

“The Golden Age Of Monsters” first appeared in Unlikely Stories