Last night, I dreamed of a dead poet and a widower who suddenly became available. I don’t mean that being bound up in love preoccupies us—to the point where we cease to be a body unattached by a cord of cells to the shape of another person’s soul (though perhaps that’s really true), but instead, an emotional face that’s been wiped clean of tribute, freed from pretending we don’t sometimes wish: that our lot lived on a parallel tract; that half of our lives were buried elsewhere, in a different plot of the cemetery; that suddenly, we believed in resurrection, if that means getting to loiter on a dented street corner, cigarette dangling from our shopworn lips—we, the young stranger, who happens, suddenly, to be us. What I mean is, in this dream I had been hungry a long time, admired for eons, yet starved, and, suddenly, the two funerals meant that I could eat. There was enough oxygen in the room for just one battered body, and, suddenly, I was it. No one else stopped breathing, but it was clear that the table—however tempting it wasn’t, with its stale victuals, that stunningly silly word—suddenly had just one seat available, and that it would, just as suddenly, go to me.
Susan Comninos's poetry has most recently appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and Juked and is forthcoming shortly in Ninth Letter.
Her debut book manuscript, “Out of Nowhere: poems,” was recently named a finalist by Conduit Books for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Award.