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Spring Time Dream
by Barry Silesky

July 13, 2020 Contributed By: Barry Silesky

It’s getting worse than I thought it would, as I fade into the old man with the cane and bedroom slippers. This one is stuck in the history he can’t let go, while trying to clear the streets in the city he’s still lost in. I’ve spent my life imagining the next city or the road to the country and the mountains I used to climb that I kept trying to bring back complete with the friends and women I left in the weeds. The view is terrific; it looks like another planet from the past up near the top. It’s the end of a trail that I keep climbing. The air so fresh it’s beyond description, and the peaks below dwindle into the house I can actually live in, with a switch to open and close the windows and a place on the side to change the oil in the car. The snow there is still waiting to melt or slipping away down the slide I skied through and still imagine. The memory is enough to keep it all alive. There must be a book that explains how I got here and where to go next.

 

 

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 13, 2020

Further Reading

Excerpts from shadowslongshoreman by José Daniel García
(Translated from Spanish by Jesse Tangen-Mills)

Day is a cooling ember. Before it gets dark as the well that engulfs the sun and retains its water, I will describe fractals with my finger over the ashy skin of dusk. Seashells swept away at night damp like an evaporated sea, like an opaque spill on a blue tablecloth covered in white crumbs. […]

BLUE by David Hawkins

Man . . . carries the stars in himself . . . —Paracelsus How would we explain it? Would we point to the calyxes of bluets growing wild in the spring ditches, or give the obligatory nod to our catch-pennied history: Boudicca, shoulders stained indigo before marching to Camulodunum— now Colchester—butchering the Roman Ninth? Or […]

Territory
by Jane Eaton Hamilton

[Editors’ Note: The following story won the This Magazine Fiction Prize and was reprinted in the author’s 2002 short fiction collection, Hunger. It is reprinted with permission here.] My husband’s idea of bliss is to be able to go back to when we first met, when he was a man and I was a woman. We weren’t kids, […]

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