By Ethan Custer
In my dream we are in our right places.
I do not know anything about you, and
I ask you how you’re doing, if you’d like to
hang out sometime, and you may as well
smile at me, nod, and then turn away.
We do not speak again for many months.
I notice this and highlight it as many
times as I can before the ink runs out,
filing it quickly away in a drawer.
In my dream I’m watching you from an
immeasurable distance and I am learning
more things about you. I buy you a CD
of an album I know you like, you buy me
a poster of a musician you know I like—
neither of us considering the other
might already have it. This is funny, so
I laugh at the absurdity, and you parrot
my laughter right back to me.
I am learning more things about you.
In my dream we’re talking at each other
more and more until to shield myself
from coordinated, calculated firebombs,
jargon like standing in front of
airplane engines spinning to life,
I begin attaching myself to you,
crawling inside of you, and we become
two, become one, become zero
just as in my dream I wrote to you,
just as, then, in the land of the conscious,
of the knowing, you wrote to me.
Contributor Bio
Ethan Custer is a junior at Ramapo College on the 4+1 MFA track in Creative Audio Technology, who is also pursuing a minor in Creative Writing. Everything he does is for his cat, Socks.
This poem is an abridged excerpt from a short story I wrote for Professor Cagle’s LITR-280 class this past spring. It’s about ignorance, counting backwards, and a love so ephemeral you find yourself wondering whether it really happened or if you’re just making all of it up.