Grid (17)
- Grid (17)
. . . a system of dreaming fake dreams.
—Lisa Robertson
I could do this in my sleep. A dreamscape from every angle. He’d been sleeping for three days and nights in a tenement hide-a-bed, naked, twitchy. With antiqued brass nailheads. Terrible silence from the sleep monitor. Into which you will fall and keep falling, immobile Alice, for a thousand and one years. Sleep of the dead, sleep of the age-yellowed sheet music. As durable as it is stylish. Just as the ventriloquist, unable to sleep, arranged her dummy on her lap. In dramatic silhouette. I was half-asleep when the phone rang, the glass shattered, the planes roared overhead. A blanket of night pulled back to receive him. Now go to sleep, the stepmother whispered. Like driftwood to which we, side by side, must cling. Who can sleep at a time like this? A true statement piece. O sleeping analyst, O insentient to-be-looked-at-ness, may I remove your spectacles? For professionals and bohemians. He sleepwalked through domestic chores: dusting ceramic angels, massaging breadcrumbs into ground beef. To float in the room. And still she sleeps in the rain-soaked cabin, dreaming of beetles. Edged with iron corners. Fall asleep in your childhood bedroom, then wake up kimonoed outside a burning well. Over which I will place a semicylinder of glass. To squirm inside ourselves, swim against darkness, and at long last, limp-bodied, collapse against the sludgy rocks of sleep, like starfish. Twist on a 19th-century classic. Curled like a sleeping comma on the edge of the bed. Trundle, canopy, four-poster, bunk. She lay in the clotted leaves sleeping through winter—what else could she do? A cloudlike presence in any space. There on the blanket behind the alley dumpster in the magic mirror mirror on the wall sleeps our just-born fawn, the future queen. In tasteful grays or robin’s-egg blues. Part of him dreams a distant bassoon [End Page 27] threw back the window curtains, part of him just lies there unmoving, pretending to sleep. [End Page 28]
JAYDN DeWALD is the author of The Rosebud Variations (Broken Sleep Books 2021), Sheets of Sound (BSB 2020), and several limited-edition chapbooks, most recently A Love Supreme: fragments & ephemera, winner of the 2019 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest. He is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Piedmont University in Demorest, Georgia, and serves as Managing Editor for COMP: an interdisciplinary journal.
I didn’t read fairy tales as a child because I didn’t read anything as a child. In college, determined to make up for two decades of nonreading, I scoured second-hand bookstores for “classics,” including children’s classics I’d never read, such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales. To this day, fairy tales remain a constant source of inspiration and comfort. I routinely sneak a tale or two (or three or four) into my nightly reading, like a square of dark chocolate—“Just one more”—before bedtime.
