On Being Led Down The Foreign Language Hallway at 3 am.

I dreamt last night I hi-fived my high school latin teacher.
He smiled and conjugated the plurals of agricola in the nominative,
then asked me to leave.
So I walked out the paper mache door jamb, which transformed
into a statue of Caesar Augustus once my back was to it.
He pointed down the hall, walled by ivy with veins thicker than leaves.
I shuffled two and a half lengths, like I was told, and the ceiling tiles
fell in, blasting into gray powder as they hit the floor around me.
So I snaked around the wreckage and looked back. He was still pointing,
now at a clock beside me, with hands of black construction paper and a face of vanilla yogurt.
Then it beeped and I sat up.




-brendan

March5poem: Story

for simon

Three-pronged crown and a girl with
a coke addiction for his birthday – they put
every card on the table
and, if he’d cared to continue the metaphor he’ve said –
too many jokers, but he didn’t and
he held his heart to her back and
felt his breath breathe back at him
as it grew hot, and faded
with the rise
and fall
of her breathing and he
wore the crown, because
he'd forgotten
to take it off.

Rae