Dreams & Nightmares, Issues 74/75

Dreams & Nightmares issues 74 and 75 appear in one neatly put together double volume. Issue 74 is made up of eleven poems, while issue 75 has eleven poems and one piece of flash fiction.

“Lonely” by Greg Beatty is a love poem…or maybe an anti-love poem. Perhaps it’s best to describe “Lonely” as a poem of love and loss in which the viewpoint character, stanza by stanza, attempts to describe his loneliness in terms of various space phenomena. In each case but one, he decides that no matter how bleak the metaphor, it can’t compete with the reality of his abandonment. The language used is sparse and somehow almost as cold as the emptiness it conveys, which, to me, is part of the strength of the piece.

Elizabeth Keogh’s “She married the wind” is a lovely bit of dark whimsy. In three stanzas it follows the odd, secluded wedding between a woman and the wind. The whole poem is full of beautiful musicality and pain. The wind is not portrayed as a kind or gentle lover, but instead as cruel and sadistic.

She married the wind on a Tuesday.
When he came, he was cold;
He tore tears from her eyes.

As with many of the poems in Dreams and Nightmares, in Keogh’s poem, the reader is left to determine for him or herself whether anything of a speculative nature truly occurs, or if the entire poem is a metaphor for an all too real-world fate. Nonetheless, this is a fine poem, and fantastic in terms of quality, whether or not it is so with regard to genre.

In “The Miracle of the Gulls, 1848,” Samantha Henderson tells a tale that mixes science fiction, religion, and childish curiosity to create something both wonderful and wondrous.

Jared was a good boy, but he never expected angels,
small and white, in the guise of gulls,
coming down ungainly from Heaven,
and devouring tiny black bodies….

This is a long poem, but the initial lines of most of its stanzas make good use of a repetitive phrase to keep the reader involved and on track

“Star People” by Bruce Boston is a 21-line example of any speculative writer’s favorite “what if” game.

If star people
were the world
each of us would be

the brightest light
in our own universe

From this start, Boston develops an elaborate and yet quite apt and interestingly constructed fantasy in which metaphor and human interaction play as great a part as science. The poem works well and leaves me as a reader feeling that I’ve seen people in a different way.

Leah Bobet’s “His Other Wives” plays with a fantasy of the fairytale variety. In fact, it takes the already slightly disturbing tale of Beauty and the Beast and turns it, in twenty-five wickedly bitter lines, into something much deeper, colder, and more believable. In Bobet’s version of the story, the Beauty whom we know from bedtime stories and Disney films is not the first attempt the Beast has made at breaking his curse.

And you tasted failure, when you learned all their
names
More bitter than apples, more bitter than salt
Because the dresses he gave you had fit someone else

There are lines in this poem that make me shiver with their insightful clarity, especially those at the end of the second stanza. For me, even were this double issue volume of Dreams and Nightmares not full of other high quality poems, “His Other Wives” would make it worth reading. As things are, however, the poem just adds to the strength of the whole.