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    Dream Apartment
    Dream Apartment
    Dream Apartment
    Ebook107 pages28 minutes

    Dream Apartment

    By Lisa Olstein

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In Dream Apartment, Lisa Olstein builds a world of night-rabbits, bodiless shadows, and networks of wind where ode and elegy meet.

    Devoted equally to the long arc and the sharp fragment, Lisa Olstein’s fifth collection maps the lucid ache at the center of night where “darkness stands in/for light,” certain heartbreaks never end, and love dovetails with losing. Immersed in ode as much as elegy, Dream Apartment employs a dynamic range of forms. Prayer-like spells cascade down the page with precision and abandon. Arrow-shot elegies explore the shock of suicide and find echoes in other kinds of grief—individual and communal, animal and ecological, sudden and creeping.

    Agile narratives mirror the dazzling associative movement of unselfconscious thought, the dreaming mind, “bodiless memory.” Whether watching a stranger carry his dead dog out of a vet’s exam room or offering bouquets of peonies to night-foraging rabbits, Dream Apartment is propelled by the way poems, like dreams, unfold new dimensions of time and space. Casting their lines toward wish and repair, recognition and reckoning, these poems reveal how any meditation on loss is an exploration of love, promising that in “dreaming, something wakes.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateSep 12, 2023
    ISBN9781619322851
    Dream Apartment
    Author

    Lisa Olstein

    Lisa Olstein is a renowned author who specializes in poetry and nonfiction. She currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

    Read more from Lisa Olstein

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      Book preview

      Dream Apartment - Lisa Olstein

      \|/

      FORT NIGHT

      The snake is

      a sleeve the deer

      puts on its mouth

      a beaded cuff

      in the haze men

      make of morning

      with each release

      of their fist-gripped

      guns. Is this a dream

      of shame is this

      a dream of potential

      unmet of possibility

      undone? School

      no pants brush

      no teeth podium

      no poems open

      door all wall.

      Dear Monster

      none of the guests

      we invited arrive.

      In the darkness

      no lion comes.

      RABBIT RABBIT

      I went to the city

      and felt a fire

      stitch into the fabric

      of my days. The

      crumbs I found

      to eat in the crisp

      gutters between

      flames were good

      as they burned

      my throat. Tourniquet

      etiquette is a way

      of not bleeding

      through the cloudy

      bandage of each

      drumming day—

      no bridge of brays

      and all the wrong

      burrs stuck in this

      coat becoming

      someone else’s.

      The stink of a man

      is a lasting kiss

      when you don’t

      want to touch or be

      touched. Evergreen

      licorice is the mind

      of the past

      of the woods

      in the wood.

      ROOT

      God made her

      his vessel. No.

      God made of her

      a vessel. No.

      The river poured

      into her as if

      a vessel. Yes.

      God made of

      her a raft. No.

      Her child clung to

      her as if a raft.

      No. Clung to her

      as a raft. Yes.

      God made of her

      a vassal. Yes

      landless

      river-pastured

      root cut loose.

      KISS

      It’s true I

      rue. I tore

      myself apart

      for you and you

      loved to watch

      me do it loved

      to watch me

      crack my hips

      like a whip toss

      myself skyward

      seeding thunder

      to the clouds.

      It’s the brain

      that feels the pain

      it’s the body

      that delivers it.

      PLUM

      To the ear

      plum is

      indistinguishable

      from plumb

      the way love

      disappears before

      no one’s eyes

      exactly how

      fathoms the line

      plumbing the air

      with the scent

      of plums in green

      morning not yet

      mourning still

      morning still

      time.

      /|\

      APPARENT WINNER

      Once the moon came close, brushed

      its rough cheek to my face, but

      before my eyes could adjust to the light

      spilling gas-like, it was retreating again

      into a more distant orbit. Is this where

      I go when I don’t want to hear

      the news or what passes for its fevered

      breath, did I earn this morning’s calm,

      no, that’s the medicine I took

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