Tom Dreitlein

I dreamt my father was stabbed last night


I dreamt a hot gold knife spread his heart in two
his chest birthed a bed of red flowers.

They filled the living room,
smelled of cigars on Sunday nights,
felt like the autumn view of my neighborhood.

I climbed the flowers, and he looked at me like he always does
like I was stitched straight from patches of his father's laugh.

He pulled me into his chest, showed me a room full of the stories he tells about me.
The walls were painted with every time I’ve said I love you;

He showed me the beach at Cape Cod
all the times we buried each other
how we broke out like sea monsters,
sand grinding as we ran for the ocean.

He showed me the hospital bed I laid in,
the day he thought screaming metal would take me away from him.
how he cried and watched warm morphine slip into me.

He showed me the first time we shared a beer,
how it was cold, and sweet
it went down and blurred the lines between us
the knots in our throats let loose
we laughed.

He showed me how it made him feel-
like a good father.

There was another room.

It was full of all the stories he doesn’t tell,
the ones nobody likes to hear.

I saw in there, covered by chipped paint
the times my mouth twisted into a soured thing.

I saw how I tore into the edges of him that weren't gilded
ones that didn’t flicker like perfect film.

I saw the way I twisted knives into the scars he showed me
how I lit aflame the gifted maps he drew.

I saw his father’s tombstone.

I saw his five year old hands pressed firm against the lettering.

I saw the warped wood at the foot of his bed, from
the tears he let pool, on
the days dust from that stone fell out from his fingernails

I saw how I pressed my hands on the door of his bedroom,
hard,
and never entered.

I dreamt my father was stabbed last night
that a hot gold knife spread his heart in two
and it smelled like cigars on Sunday nights
and he birthed
a bed
of bright
red flowers,
one
for every time
I’ve said
I love you.


Dream Journal


I am sitting in the living room
In my empty house

I am counting cracks in the drywall

I look down at the spiral notebook in my hands
It reads:

When I was four
my brother locked me inside a toy chest during a game of hide and seek.
When my mom found me I was snoring.

My knuckles are scraped and
I know I spent all day knocking on the side door
From the inside
The way a corpse might

My brother shows up with a dead grill
So we pour our teeth in and light them like coals
We roast the notebook

When he leaves
He shoves me back in the house
Gives me the chard pages
And walks into traffic

I am sitting in the living room
I realize I have never looked upstairs

So I check the bedroom
And there I am
My torso is flayed open by the semi-truck
A tube is shoved down my throat
There is a surgeon trying to sew me together

Confetti is blowing out
I can hear a fan in my lungs

I ask the surgeon to stop:

Let me bleed
Please.

I’ve spent days with my lips stitched open
my stomach stitched shut.
These guys have had nowhere to go but out my mouth.

I’m sour of the taste.

I’d like to live outside myself
without licking each moment
before I throw it against the wall.

The surgeon pulls his mask off
mouthless
he instead writes on his face:

Taste is your means to learn.
Walls won’t change you
no matter how you paint them.

I go downstairs

I am sitting in my living room
I am chewing my notebook


Little Briggins Circle, Fairport


My father is ashing his cigar in a bowl made from the weeping willow that used to coat our back yard in shadow. He is looking off down the street. He says:

I’ve seen the leaves change from here
I have seen them wilt for our applause
I have seen families come and go,
come and go.

Here only the trees die. And they too birth something beautiful. We turn every loss pretty in the suburbs. We look at stumps and see only history, the kind that comes from years of bleached textbooks. We cut away the rings bagged under our eyes. We grind down each moment until it can fit in our hands. We pretend you can rip a stump from the earth without leaving a grave -an open mouth wailing- we gag each scar in our town with soil, use seeds as stitches. Which is to say we erase what history our tragedies try to gift us. And when we have gutted a death of its context. We take a bite of the trunk. We dip our hands in and remove the heart. We make from the hollow loss, a bowl.

One we can fill with our own agenda.

My father’s eyes are old. His rings wrinkle out from the socket, he lets them grow. Let’s thewillow’s stump stand, a corpse spit apart by saplings. He’s seen what holding on too tight can do to a man. Still, he only knows one way to love. He looks at me and says:

Tonight
You’re leaving.

Take this bowl,
I made it from your childhood.
The one you ripped out of the earth
the first time you drove off down the highway.

I grinded away each petty loss,
each ugly death.

All that is left is our streets,
our homes
folded into a bowl for you.

I filled it with ash.
Add what you want.


Tom Dreitlein is a poet from Rochester, NY. A senior studying English at the University of Buffalo, he currently works as a Teaching Artist at the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology. He wants to talk to you about poetry and other things you can scream along to in your friend’sbasement.