Allison Thorpe
auntie dreams of dark water and other things
She had the dream again when her third husband Wendell fell off the roof and broke his leg, when her cousin
Millie's boy left home and joined the army, when her sister's dog Bozo got hit by a car and died. In the
dreams she would see a lake all blue and sparkling turn darkly to a swirling mass and go down the drain,
leaving a muck-ridden basin.
Whenever she had the dream, she would call my mother several times a day until a tragedy surfaced. One
night, after a six pack, my father grabbed the phone and told her to take a god damn drain stopper and
put it under her pillow.
Auntie never saw her lake again. It disappeared like all the booze my father loved so much. Instead she
dreamed of walruses with very long tusks, dark prophesies lost among the secret smile in her eyes.
Bio
The author of one book of poems and one chapbook, I have published in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Citron Review, The Meadow, Clapboard House, Lingerpost, Snail Mail Review, Trickster, Front Range Review, Freshwater, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Star 82 Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, Bluestone Review, 3 Elements Review, Agave Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Heartland Review, and Motif V. 4 - seeking its own level: an anthology of writings about water.