Jessica Purdy

​ 
Pupa Dreaming
 
I put my ear to the monarch larva munching milkweed because it must be making noise the way it’s chomping—like a typewriter bangs out letters to make words, or like my grandfather would eat corn on the cob, butter dripping down his chin, flecks of yellow corn flying from his mouth and us grinning behind our hands. I get so close I can hear the little guy chewing. Is this its voice? The larva think we are so stupid with our imaginations and equations. Why would they need to talk? With each move, their sets of legs follow along. Look at them crawling upside down on the bottom of a leaf! Heads and tails nearly identical. They don’t know whether they’re coming or going. What bugs do have voices? What about crickets? Their song is a kind of voice but not from any mouth. Their legs the viola and bow singing love songs. And cicadas too, with their little horny tymbal membranes of desire. The monarch caterpillars work hard at being metaphors for poems and sermons. Growing faster than weeds and messing with our minds at transformation time. Do we believe it because it’s true or is it true because we believe it? They are really harping on their status as miracles. Now they’ve lost their skins and become little green pods hanging from the rafters like sleeping vampires. They dream of stained glass windows and the purple-gold taste of sugar, of sailing to the silence of Mexico for rekindling the aerial dance of their love. 
 
**
 
 
The Dream Act Explained
 
There is no somnolent village. The brain’s wires can turn against the somatic as well as the soul and torment the body of the afflicted. A lycanthrope is institutionalized when visions of demons cause violent acts. In my nightly visitations I feel sorrow and anger more fervently than when I am awake. The village in my vision is no fairy tale illustration. No church steeple. No quiet mattresses of homes or cypress trees spiralling toward the clouds. Souls I meet there are in airports needing care. I take on other strange shapes. My baby disappears when I drop her down a hole to a better life. There is no one that will help me locate her without revealing I do not belong. She was a “dreamer.” Her body fell through the air and shimmered and was gone. I had trusted she would be safe before I could follow. Women on the floors below wanted her for her black eyes. My body was too large to fit. Hair sprouted from my chin and I roared.
 
**
 
Gratitude List
 
At bedtime I make a list of ailments     body parts that hurt     at night I wake myself with a full body lunge away from the nightmare abductor coming     at me through that thin dissolving membrane     at dawn I wonder what color the sky is     at ten I thought double digits     at once I must combine all I’ve consumed and form it like clay     at my desk I put my head down and sob     at school my teacher would turn out the lights and make us put our heads down     at school I longed     at dinner     at church     at home     was I ever in charge at all     at times I was seven and scared     at other times I was 18 and looking over my shoulder     at bedtime I make a list of gratitudes     stuff the headphones in my ears against anyone’s noises     at my own noise     the gears in my head     at my friend’s house we listened to music and     at the pond we smoked     at lunch we gathered in the courtyard     at bedtime I make a list of ailments     at the top of my head     at the bottom of my feet     at no time am I ever     at no time am I ever     at once old and young and     at bedtime I make a list of gratitudes leaking in like music that won’t die     at the hooks that dig in and sing until I’m sick with it     at night I leak like music     at church     at the dance     at memory     at all at all at all
 
**
 
I Dream My Daughter and I Are on Vacation
 
I tell her I will buy all the thrift shop dresses she loves. The ribbon dresses, the chiffon, and the denim. I tell her she can walk at night freely in transparent plum colours. She can slide down the cleft of a landslide into the ocean if she wants. She can click her heels down any aisle or forest path. She can fill her lungs with smoke or clean mountain air. Her teeth can grind the hardest diamonds into speech. Her tongue can taste, ingest, or detest wine. Still she will be safe. She will know her ideas are the changing sky we worship.
 
**
 
On A Morning White as Cotton Batting
 
I’m coming out of dreams of a before-life, belly crawling. My arms drag me over the dirt, legs trailing. Belongings held in caches along the way. I’m showing my son the bed I shared with his father. (Was this our room?) And my pregnancy belly up against the brick walls. What lighting! And I can’t remember if this was where we ate. What I thought was coming next. I’m telling my son this is where we slept, but the light is on, and there are no windows. What does he expect of his next steps? Our cat’s dying is when he first learned that death rests in mulch in the shadow of the house with flies in its eyes. What about your great grandma dying? He can only remember sitting on her lap and being afraid of her wattle. She was kind and quiet. You used to pretend to be her, I tell him. Shuffled along with her walker wearing her slippers. He asks, Is that when you knew your boy was gay? Were you disappointed when you found out? Of course not, I say. I was terrified for your safety. I am on the ground with my face in doll guts. Watching my breath. My heart sounds too close, gunning against the what-ifs.
 
 
**
 
concerned I might have a doubt about it my swan arranges a seance at the wedding 
 
no weeding of geese //  somnambulist trains //  and nuances pertain to anything aware of ascots and veins protruding //  as if blood dries like paint and the puddles form pearls of lists //  as if the culprit is in the culvert with the bones of the child left wrapped in his blanket of lies //  the blue of the soft felt against the wisp of his wishbone cheek //  the satin edge deckled as paper in a lint of books //  the lilt of lit fuses //  also ranging as a motorbike //  rattle and fart blast of air and mortgage of sunshine //  only the masters can mediate //  for all along the wall was art and music //  much music of lies //  of laughter and mores and morass //  where all the bugs you could encounter //  what was this beetle with the glass wings //  what was this machine of dirt  // where all that can be named is metaphor and brittle laughter //  and enemies designing cheap concert tee shirts //  all along the fevered walls the tomato bugs swarm //  the ants and their armies //  their black bodies glinting like guns //  flint of lighter snicking from the wheel against the grain //  the grind and gird of concrete and steel beams //  the sun and how hot metal sears the skin that grazes it //  even the fork //  even the suit the spoon //  the shine of a steer //  of an iconoclast in sunglasses //  ideas of heaven and earth that leave even the brightest smile a smirk //  the landing of stairs twenty feet up //  the bodies found there bludgeoned //  their portraits above them hanging from nails
 
**
  
What Nobody Tells You About Sleep
 
It has common demons as far back as 2400 BC, incubi and succubi, witches, Liliths, Old Hags, and horned gods who sit on your chest to stop your breathing. Sleep paralysis – a witch who smirks at you while licking the mouth of another woman; it is a bat that lands on your petrified chest; it is the ghost of a boy who died by suicide. It has hypnagogic hallucinations as you are falling asleep – the plunge off a cliff which wakes you up with a jerk. Hypnopompic hallucinations in the transition to wakefulness – visions of black letters, of grainy footage, frottage. It has sleep misperception, aka paradoxical insomnia – you think you are awake all night, but really you were asleep. There are lucid dream vibrations – buzzing sounds; a feeling of hands curling into claws; an electric current running in the veins. If you dream of death you are undergoing a life transition. The part of your brain that deals with language shuts off when you sleep. Only poets can read words in their dreams.
 
**
 
Jessica Purdy is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, SoFloPoJo, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, NH.