I fall asleep reading Cleve Jones, his memoir on gay rights. Inspiration after a desperate election, pandemic year. My eyelids close on a Greek chorus, gays and lesbians marching, the white night of San Francisco, edenic city, ablaze. I hear their cries and grief, the murder of Harvey Milk, loss of his “Hope.”
I am wary of dreams and their many ghosts, so prominent my defenses. Maybe, it’s the amitriptyline. Slow fade into drugged sleep. Recommended by a father-figure therapist, the Syrian, who vowed “to kick my ass,” who sits on edge at the promise of my any fantasy, pen in hand, cocked with drying ink. (Not all relate to my mother.)
In one, I am wearing a gray suit, tight and ill-fitting, very ’80s, with sharp lapels and bulbous shoulders, a black turtleneck. It is August and dusk. I am standing on the dock at our family’s summer retreat, a still lake. It is rustic and social, a proper lodge for the white elite. Couples sip, and dry vermouth stains the air. I recognize them all: prom date, red state neighbors whispering their “norms,” the college roommate I swore I loved, East Village dykes wearing away my final charades. I toy with my wedding ring, its silver etchings and wear.
As evening falls, I find myself searching for my daughter, calling her name. The dream’s revelers meet my eyes, nod a glass, even wink, but none will help me in their martini haze. I hear faint cries as I walk nearer to the water’s edge. My child peers up from beneath the murky surface. I see her tiny mouth gasp, eyes close, body sinking further from reach. I leap into cold water, the weight of wool as I struggle to kick. I catch her in my arms, rush to light, and reaching air, I see her face, now my own.
Waking with mute scream, I fumble for my glasses. My wife tosses beside me. A yawning cat stretches in the moonlight. I walk the carpet, search my children’s rooms, sounds of their innocence, sleeping.
Mary Warren Foulk has been published in VoiceCatcher, Cathexis Northwest Press, Yes Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Palette Poetry, Silkworm, and Steam Ticket among other publications. Her manuscript Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) won first place in The Poetry Box’s 2021 chapbook contest. Her poem “portrait of a queer as a young boy” has been nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net Anthology. A graduate of the MFA Writing program at VCFA, Mary lives in western Massachusetts with her wife and two children.
