Jim Daniels

Dreaming the Flowers Awake

 

You know how old friends show up
in dreams wanting to shoot up
or screw in the backseat like old times?
Or smile smug goodbyes as they watch
you drop into free fall? Or suddenly
materialize, only to evaporate

into nervous rain? “Hello Out There,”
the theme song for my old-fashioned
variety show. Forgive me the dancing girls—
dreams, can live with them, can’t…
I want to dream of dead friends
rising like first spring flowers

through the uncertainty of frozen earth,
but my own children are trampling
those flowers. Trampling, giggling.

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Jim Daniels’ latest books include The Luck of the Fall, fiction; The Human Engine at Dawn, Gun/Shy, and Comment Card, poetry. His first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming in 2025. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.