abstract dream

 

RHINO IN THE BEDROOM

He was small at first and tolerable, like a Steiff toy dragged by one ear and dropped there by one of the children, though he seemed to move from place to place, as her Storybook Dolls had when she was a girl. But soon he began to grow. Her husband, oblivious, walked through the creature, sat on him, covered him with newspapers.

At night, she was aware of the lightning bolt in the rhino's eyes, and she began to feel the tip of his horn at the small of her back, his breath against her face, the indentation of his body on her side of the bed. In short: he was disturbing; but every time she tried to talk with him, he gazed at her, inhaled, and grew larger.

Whenever she mentioned the rhino, her husband said he was late for a meeting, a game, or couldn't hear her over the bounce of the ball on TV. Then the rhino began to brush against her, make noises with his lips, root through her drawers and closets, rub her back, examine her journals. And he continued to grow, until

one morning when her husband was at work, the rhino knelt down and, for the first time, he spoke. I love you, he said. Unconditionally. No one had ever loved her uncondition­ally—not her parents, husband, or even the children. I'm subtle, he continued in a husky tone, and conveniently insubstantial. O Beloved, take me into the savannah of your heart.

A person who says size doesn't matter, has never had a horny rhinoceros in the bedroom.

 

 

RED CHAIR WITH BLUE FISH

A red kitchen chair underwater where a school of neon fish swims past, not in its space but observing, alert to the chair and its possibilities, a chair that once had a Formica table—the kind with uneven legs where you need a matchbook to level it, though no one we know smokes any more, so the table's gone to Goodwill but the red chair is underwater. That 50s chair, leatherette and stainless, expects me, so I submerge. The chair, you know, implies the impossible is possible, even gills and the need to sit on it wearing a snap-front house dress and wedgies. Soon I unfold a wet newspaper, take drags on a wet unfiltered Camel and watch nervous blue fish watching how I'm underwater, too. Reaching out, I grab a pair by arrow tails and use them as drumsticks on the top of the uneven, vanished table. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Not accurate, since these fish are all blue. But if I wanted truth I wouldn't be here. Inhale, exhale. I watch smoke encircle fish and wreaths of it rise with a warp of bubbles. This may be a place of suffocation and death or maybe some wet dream seined from another life—Mother's, perhaps, though she wouldn't have let fish in her kitchen still wearing their heads and tails, you know. She preferred hers gutted and boned. But not me. I breathe in the mystery of how they swam here and how I came to join them, to inhale and exhale. This wet world is untroubled by present tense, lets me move with watery grace, yet has the weight of time pressing down. And if you tell me the red chair exists, instead, in a Chinese cafe propped by a fish tank, I still won't want mushu or plum sauce, only smoke—smoke and stainless and red sheen and wild-eyed electric blue fish.



BLOCK PARTY, Susan Terris (Puddinghouse Publications, 2008)

 

BLOCK PARTY was a winner of the Pudding House Chapbook competition in 2007. It is all prose poems.       –S.T.