An Order for Dreams by Cynthia X. Hua

In my American dream, I kept dreaming
of the garden of eternal spring.

I want to be a sonnet, a tuning fork, a light country rain
and make all the world inside me a dumb kind of beautiful.

The willow ptarmigan molts its colors for winter, but then
breaks its own image to sing, and I too am a broken stone.

There’s a kick in my womb like a Matryoshkan order to dreams,
and my truths arrive wading through watery lies like lamplight.

How I come unbound is a hand-holding parted by waveforms,
until the clock hands inside me stop and I cannot sleep at night.

2.

A soft rust is forming on the ears of the stone lions,
which have been roaring in anguish for a thousand odd years.

Where I saw a bridge, I jumped the way I saw escaping spiders
make up their own dimensions, and the snow fall over Chinatown.

The train on the overpass shutters slightly, and I stutter
on the steps of perfect darkness.

In national springtime, we sleepwalked through Summer Palace.
I was the son or daughter of a sleepless night from the long past.

The year ends somewhere near Christmas,
a house of free speech inside a language we do not speak.

3.

You want a way out of darkness, but so often
the past dreams a different dream.

In the jar, the body wakes up suspended in amber.
I lost a dog as a child. I will always remember.

They drove me through the lonely land,
beneath handfuls of gathering osprey, calling and calling
until the evening yields and I pick its droplets like blueberries.

Cynthia X. Hua is a poet and artist. She was previously a Finalist for the Norman Mailer Awards in Poetry, and a fellow with Brooklyn Poets. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Glass Poetry and Carbon Culture.