The Dream of Parsnips
       

Do I wish for a box of cigars-or dynamite?
Do I wish for the sudden squirming of earthworms?

Do I wish for the dense smell in Grandma Ida's dining room
or some prix fixe? Do I wish for

the standing-outside-his-lit-office-window-at-two-in-the-morning
as only a sophomore can stand . . . or for

the husband to scrap the skank?
Or perhaps for the researcher herself who believes:

"dreaming is not a parallel state but consciousness itself,

in the absence of the senses' input"?
Considering various explanatory projects,

I do wish that wishing would process
whatever calls up an object so white and duplicitous.

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Copyright © 2014 Kimiko Hahn All rights reserved
from Brain Fever
W. W. Norton & Company
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission