maybe this is the life of your dreams?

by Annie Stenzel

We were talking about dreams, and I said it’s rare these days for me even to dream of flying though I used to do that often as a child and even after. Then the memories poured in: how sometimes I flew like Superman — prone and adept in the buoyant air but with my arms out to the side at an angle, like wings. At other times I was upright…as though the air beneath my feet was solid as the forest floor but I moved, a hundred or a thousand feet above the ground without walking. // Yesterday, a whole poem presented itself to me, and I wrote it down line by line as though I were simply taking dictation. Later, but still yesterday, another wonder seized me and again I marveled. Maybe this is the life of my dreams. // I could see so much from however high up I was when I did all that dream-flying, and I remember thinking, as I stared out the window during my very first airplane flight, yes! That’s exactly what it looks like in my dreams. 

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was released from Kelsay Books in July, 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including Book of Matches, Does it have pockets, Gavialidae, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, One Art, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SWWIM, The Lake, Thimble, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.