Aurora Magazine 2008

Michelle Adler, Dusk in the Meadow of the Fireflies , Oil on Canvas

A Dream by: Freda Rohrer

Woman, Unpainted by: Miranda Silotto

My brother was gone, Snatched out of his computer chair

Her muddy boots are too big. Coat Size: too small squatting in the corner where the tall building and dumpster shake hands, and say “Hallo” She looks up at me. with vacant eyes, and sunken cheeks irises cold and gray like Chicago steel she is as thin as the colored paper that she folds into pink flowers and sells On Maxwell Street, She’ll sell her flower. amongst the Polish sausages where she swims in a lake of Klezmer melodies there on the street now in a corner crouching in a pool of piss and vomit she looks up and smiles and, I’m thinking of Carl Sandburg.

By a man in a tall hat and Pretzel-shaped sunglasses. Three tasks, the man said. Complete them and he will be returned. I zipped up my jacket So that I was invincible, Slogged through gray sand To win a footrace against a deer Who changed into a wild-haired boy and back, Took an emerald-encrusted lamp In the shape of a blowfish From an old woman with slender teeth like a piranha, Told the ghost in the VCR To bugger off and stop dripping metaphysical goo On the carpet, and then

Went back to the man in the tall hat And demanded my brother back. He laughed and turned into a black cat

And darted under a car. I woke, flushed and tense Until I saw my brother totter past my bedroom door.