Lindsey Warren
Sentence, Forest
There are places I want
to leave. Places where I
am not dreamed of.
Places in my dream that
are just entrance
and loosely there, places
where the thoughts don’t sit
well on my skin.
I could know everyone:
the hidden woman with the hot
cheeks and the stone
house, the chairs in the
fluorescent lights but I
know this is underground,
and I have a leaf
from me, I have to
keep going. Going from one
basement to another
part dream, part plant, part
green pressed on in a mind
in love with but unaware of
its feet, and places become
words that only know how
to speak to each other
with absence: grace:
out. I give myself
to the air and receive myself
in return, a feeling goes there,
right there, I had it but
gave that up, too. Once
I made a TV show
for my neighbors to watch –
one full of cocktail parties
and news from under
my bed – while I went off
to look for the other
parts of me that were
most likely dream and did
not find them, I only
made a place: a pond
I call an e for blue
and a b for fire pink
and an ave for when I
float over the water before
moving toward the green. And
the forest: I haven’t been
there in years. A year
is a century in this place
I might not have created
but dreamed, like I
was dreamed, an ocean
of trees my birthright and all
my steps, steps that
one by one go
out like lights, or like
me when I green,
go out.
to leave. Places where I
am not dreamed of.
Places in my dream that
are just entrance
and loosely there, places
where the thoughts don’t sit
well on my skin.
I could know everyone:
the hidden woman with the hot
cheeks and the stone
house, the chairs in the
fluorescent lights but I
know this is underground,
and I have a leaf
from me, I have to
keep going. Going from one
basement to another
part dream, part plant, part
green pressed on in a mind
in love with but unaware of
its feet, and places become
words that only know how
to speak to each other
with absence: grace:
out. I give myself
to the air and receive myself
in return, a feeling goes there,
right there, I had it but
gave that up, too. Once
I made a TV show
for my neighbors to watch –
one full of cocktail parties
and news from under
my bed – while I went off
to look for the other
parts of me that were
most likely dream and did
not find them, I only
made a place: a pond
I call an e for blue
and a b for fire pink
and an ave for when I
float over the water before
moving toward the green. And
the forest: I haven’t been
there in years. A year
is a century in this place
I might not have created
but dreamed, like I
was dreamed, an ocean
of trees my birthright and all
my steps, steps that
one by one go
out like lights, or like
me when I green,
go out.
Biography
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Lindsey Warren is a recent graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program. She has been published in Rubbertop Review, Marathon Review, GASHER Journal, Josephine Quarterly, American Literary Review and Hobart, among others. Lindsey is the recipient of a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship and has been a finalist for the Delaware Literary Connection Prize and the Joy Harjo Prize. A poem of hers is in the anthology What Keeps Us Here: Songs from the Other Side of Trauma. She splits her time between Ithaca, New York and Newark, Delaware.
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