The others tell their dreams at breakfast,
luring wakefulness with coffee, buttered bread.
But all day, something hovers
just beyond sight – you start
at a touch on the shoulder, a tap
at the door. At the park, at lunchtime,
you hear schoolgirls whisper
gravely to each other: You dreamed
you were falling? You know,
you die if you don’t wake up.
Jenn Koiter lives in Wyoming, where she recently leapt out of the frying pan of academia into the fire of nonprofit work. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Relief, Ruminate, GHOTI, Fickle Muses, and The Eleventh Muse, and she is a winner of the 2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.