The Aliens Watch the Mother Dream
Tonight’s watching arrests us,
makes us think. She bolts in bed
suddenly, her heart mammal, muskrat;
she’s feral, a small bird with a smaller
heart, she wakes, blinks several times
in the dark.
We are silent, studying. Watch her there,
as we observe what we know is language
unformed beneath her shallow breathing,
notice her thought move to rising, thought
to tread up wooden stairs in her house,
to the bedside of her girl, to curl her body
around the other little body as a vine
curls around a brick.
She’d been standing on the bluff
above an ambiguous beach, sudden tide rolled in.
They’d only ever been to the ocean once
and she’d felt anxiety at that Atlantic edge,
fearing the great suck and pull, imagining then,
her children slurped from her grasp.
In this one, this night, she feels the water
surge around her ankles, knowing her girl
is farther up the beach, having seen her there
moments before in dream-time, a wisp
cradling a shell’s half-moon. She knows
when she looks up, the girl will be gone,
and she is.
Lifted, dangling, she cries out Mama!
in the full body of the wave. She dives,
swims, but her three-year-old cannot.
She grasps for ankle, for straws.
The next wave rides in.
Tonight, we note the lack of rising,
the decision to stay under covers, skull pressed
firmly into soft pillow. Note the time it takes
for the heart to quiet, still.
Tonight we note the subsequent waking,
her worrying of the dream, even in the early
subterranean hours of the following day.
We decipher partial language and flicked image,
notice this one stays with her, clutched, filed.
She’s felt the real pull of a real ocean
on her calves; she’s clung to their little hands.
Love is such a mother
to fear, births it over and over again,
carries it wrapped tightly against her breast,
wakes often to nurse its hungry mouths,
to care for it, to watch it,
and to keep it alive.
Kristina Erny (she/her) is a third-culture poet who grew up in South Korea. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and is the author of Elijah Fed by Ravens (Solum Literary Press 2024). Her work has been the recipient of the Tupelo Quarterly Inaugural Poetry Prize and the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, as well as a finalist for the Coniston Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, Blackbird, and Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She currently lives and works in Shanghai, China, where she teaches at an international school with her partner and their three children.
