By MEGAN SIMS
Last night I dreamt I drove to La Reunion,
a defunct socialist utopian colony on the Trinity River,
which has always to me seemed less river, more repository,
more gaping concrete scar across the city of Dallas.
The bridges they build to cross the ugly thing are beautiful.
I dreamed of traffic.
I had to cross through people, rivers, columns of a place I knew for some might seem
like La Reunion’s legacy. But I feared it.
I was searching for the cemetery
thinking there I might find the ghosts of past somebodies or
the place I never had a chance to grow up.
Once I dreamed I was on a ship that broke in two.
The front half kept on sailing the Riviera while the back half
sunk suddenly into the abyss. I mourned this,
estimated eighty people lost their lives
in one sinking moment. I don’t know why we kept sailing.
In my dreams this had happened before, as though I was being followed
by a gaping hole in the universe, a tear in the surface of the earth.
On some island I never saw before (will never see again), we docked
and I read the names I almost forgot and I dreamed again of La Reunion
where the river doesn’t swallow you whole and home
is waiting on the other side of the thinning crowd
of the ghosts dropped here.
Perhaps this is the other side.
Megan Sims (megansims@college.harvard.edu) dreams.