By day, I set out a feast of intentions.
At night, they come back to feast on me.
Once I had a dream that turned out to be true
that a demon was devouring a cat outside my window.
In the moonlight, the cat beat useless wings
and shrieked like a subway train.
The next morning, circling the bloodstain,
my bookish child swore it had been the chupacabra.
Later, I heard thirdhand about the likelihood of coyotes
and the distant chance of a mountain lion.
Then, my dreams were radial and spacious,
night-long affairs seeded with the day's mundanities,
swirling into surreal impossibilities
until the clock ran out.
Middle age dreams crowd closer to truth--
the just-missed flight,
a tree collapsing the roof of the car,
the children going missing.
I subsist on the relief of waking to different catastrophes.
There will be days to celebrate
the languorous meal I have become,
with the accumulated fat of menopause and worry.
In the new dreams,
I will beat my ragged wings on the ground,
not much body left to speak of,
and wonder at how delicious the burden of years has made me--
at how the beast, metabolizing a wholly new magic,
licks its lips and sighs, contented,
before drifting off to sleep.
