Dreambreak (Stanza Means Room)

by Theodore Heil

Joao Prates

Camera means chamber, as in shot through with light.

In dreams, pasts of my mother appear and the she-wound remains.

I crush Tylenol with a spoon — stir into coffee, never finish.

On the train, I sit after her face winning over mine.

I place my hands over the heat off of

license plates, thinking, like a baby bird, it’s her.

In the dreams, I am young and my mother opens her

fist of iron, a flower blooming at the center of her palm.

I reach for it —  the hand, the bloom, she

disappears — fucile is a gun, a letter away from futile.

I emerge from sleep not knowing who performed the disappearing.

The past cannot be triangulated. I speak to her only in pictures now.

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Theodore Heil has poems in Farewell Transmission, Ninth Heaven, Book of Matches, and elsewhere. He was long-listed in 2024 for the Dawn Review’s Poetry Prize. He is an editorial fellow at A Public Space and lives in New York.