by Linda Parsons
Dreaming, I pass myself asleep on the street with the homeless others under the overpass, my face turned away. But the hair color isn’t mine—is it my mother instead, so unsettled in the world, cursing the dark rather than one candle lit to dispel her imagined sticks and stones? In life, she raved like those at the bus stop on Broadway arguing with the mute air, her battlements raised against anyone who disputed her word, no white flag or peace to her name. I awake with dried blood on my cheek, above the dog bite’s scar, a bruise on my forearm. What angel wrestled me on night’s warring barricades, what beast left its mark in sleep’s hard labor? It’s said that, when frozen in dreams with no breath to scream, we can enter a waking state and turn to fight. O Mother, though you’ve flown to another plane, we can both turn and fight for what was lost between us. We are more distant than ever, yet you shadow my dreams. Let me pass you on the street and know you as never before in this life or the next to come.
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Emerge Literary Journal 