There’s a recurring dream I have in which all that’s familiar fades out where Cemetery Hill goes off into infinite grasslands and forests. Sidewalks diminish into dirt tracks and then into just a path between trees. In this forest park I can smell the density of trees and ferns, can see the sun spray motes of floating light, can hear each sound damped into silence, and can feel the cool moistness of shade. The summer smell changes here, becoming primeval moments in future tense. The magic lasts only minutes. This is the misty edged undefined boundary. Here anything can happen, can become possible. Many are lost in this crossing, as I am, into a who-knows-where among all the dreams of endless journeys where all these memories transform. I find myself climbing wooden stairs at the back of a brick house, up from an iron-gated garden, entering a kitchen floored in green linoleum, where I think I’ve never been. Or have I? You know, where the long squall of a train whistle goes unheard, it’s so familiar. Where the old windows rattle as freight trains rumble by, and you smell diesel from a big engine idling. On the tracks, children play with oncoming death and put a penny on the rails, then climb a trestle in a game of hide and seek, while we count the cars, clackity-clacking to a steady beat then wave to the man in the red caboose.
Laura A. Ciraolo lives and works in New York City. She’s had poems recently in MiPOesias, Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, Boston Literary Magazine and Shattercolors. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s finishing a graduate degree in Theology.