A POEM BY KATHLEEN ROONEY


          ONEIROMANCE


          Instinct says, Sleep with the lights on again.
          Amen to that. You talk in your sleep.
          Go ahead & run—you’ll just die tired.
          A bride in a field, a chatelaine who looks
          like me, watches & keys on a chain around
          her waist, carries a copy of the Oneirocritica
          by Artemidorus. Next: a chorus. A stadium
          radiant with kliegs. Two more figures
          in the same field, like plastic cake toppers.
          Eyes closed, ears stoppered to all but their
          voices. They lay out my choices. One’s called
          Call. One’s called Response.

                                              When I say Marriage
                                              you say Run!
                                              Marriage! Run!
                                              Marriage! Run!

          Where do I go for something in between
          & when I wake up, what will it mean?
          O night, O flight, O adumbral belovéd!
          You are besotted. I am lean & succinct.
          Who put all this darkness in our little room?



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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her first book is Reading With Oprah, and her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Small Spiral Notebook, Harvard Review, and RealPoetik, as well as the anthologies Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets and The Book of Irish American Poetry: from the 18th Century to the Present. Her essay "Live Nude Girl" appears in Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006).


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