Interpreting Dreams

Megan Nichols

If everyone in the dream is you(and everyone in the dream is you)then when you stand naked in the classroom,you are the classmates, the teacher, and the flesh.And when your mother drowns you in the tubyou are the mother, the child, and the bathwater.And when all your teeth fall out at once, thinkof yourself as not just the Chiclets clatteringto the tile, not just the empty mouth gaping, gumssoftening like frozen yogurt melt. No, thinkof yourself as the fall too, not the thing that will fall,or the thing that has fallen, not the force behindthe falling, nor the thing that falls. You are the verb,the act of, the motion as it moves.

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Megan Nichols is the author of the chapbook Animal Unfit (Belle Point Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Threepenny Review, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry reader for River Mouth Review and is Associate Managing Editor for Poetry at Variant Literature.

Cover of the Threepenny Review Winter 2023

Spring 2023

Berkeley, California

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Wendy Lesser

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