When
I was a child,
I would disassociate from my body
before sleep. Sometimes
I was a pinprick in the sheets, drowning
under the suffocating weight.
I was terrified. Sometimes
my arms were too heavy for my body.
I was paralyzed.
I waited, sweating in bodily hallucinations... tricks
of mind... ‘You know very well you’re not real,
I’d hear. ‘I am real!’
I’d cry.
I’d leap out of bed in bodily reclamation,
flexing fingers and toes, praying
this wasn’t how sleep would always be.
Finally slipping into lucid dreams,
I could speak to those that slept while
I unslept.
They’d often ask me, ‘how long is forever?’
And while
I don’t know,
I am relieved to be thousands of sleeps
from those night-terror-masked dreams. Sometimes
I remember her pale blue dress guiding
through rolling prairie and... oh,
I can’t quite remember... no,
I can’t
quite remember
the day Alice went home. She used to ask me:
I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields,
that it kisses them so gently?
I think it must, in reply.
Tonight
I rest in a blue blanket
and a cup of chamomile, yet
I notice my toes wiggling under the sheets...
The steam from my tea rises
and reads: Who...Are...
You?
Cue: tea party and Jabberwocky: The jaws that bite,
the claws
that catch!
and now
I’ve forgotten my name...
Cue: Cheshire-smile moon
outside my window. The whiskered mouth speaks:
We’re all mad here.
I’m mad.
You’re mad.
My rabbit readies a burrow into the carpet.
I frantically search for my name.
A steam engine whistles in the distance...
NOTES:
Excerpts taken from Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan, 1865) and Through the Looking Glass (Macmillan, 1871)
Nicolette Ratz is a Wisconsin-based poet and seasonal worker in science support and farming. Her most recent adventures include assisting climate science on the Greenland Ice Sheet and operating a picker for an organic Northwoods cranberry farm. She uses poetry to explore the influence dreams and imagination have on personal growth in relation to the natural world. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Citron Review, Ghost City Review, The Antarctic Sun and Rue Scribe.