POEM OF THE MONTH
March
Dreams
Lunula by Derek Mueller
Dreaming as Evidence
The dreams arrive full-mooned;
the stars evidence of a kindness—
an uncle, once a wound on the porch, left leg missing—
a prayer
or punchline, an inheritance of desire a truth we spin
late at night,
a lullaby our fathers once sang-once, they forgot how
to religion—
they shook a church beneath their hands,
revealed what it was like to drown
in rivers they once crossed, their throats heavy
with salt, thunder,
lightning— shook monsoons down our lungs—
but we were just kids,
before we knew what we could sow, we ripped rinds from oranges,
peeled pericardium layer by layer, became sick all on our own—
once, my mother stopped on the side of the road to apply lipstick—
I watched her, mouth open then close, then open then look to me in the rearview mirror,
you look just like him-evidence of a kind of inheritance—
evidence of a grief or violence, evidence of a prayer we left on the
porch, left leg missing-evidence of a truth we spin, a church we
shook, a monsoon we lullabied,
evidence of a dream where everyone is still alive.
Margarita Cruz is a part-time educator, president of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, and contributor for the Arizona Daily Sun. She has received support from the Tin House Writer's Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Macondo and others. Her works have been featured in Ploughshares, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day series among others.
I tend to think of memory as circular, which often translates itself as being able to explore narratives in dream-like landscapes. In memory and in dream, there's a lot to play around with as we uncover truths about ourselves, histories or our families--we get to reimagine how the story went or understand what actions in the past might have actually meant. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time looking up what dreams meant in dream dictionaries because I had once been told that everything in our dreams comes from something we once knew so now I spend time navigating my own past through poetry that moves through these dreamlands in search of understanding my own histories. There is truth in our dreams.
Margarita Cruz’s “Dreaming as Evidence” mesmerizes with its dreamlike structure that mirrors memory’s circular nature. What captivates me most is how the poem’s form — with its indentations creating a visual cascade — physically embodies the way memories spiral and nest within one another. Cruz masterfully weaves together fragments of family history: “an uncle, once a wound on the porch,” (ah!) fathers who “forgot how to religion,” and that striking moment of recognition in the rearview mirror. I love how the repetition in the final stanzas transforms earlier lines into evidence itself, creating a sort of poetic DNA test that reveals inheritance as both blessing and burden. The line “evidence of a dream where everyone is still alive” delivers an emotional punch that reverberates back through the entire poem, suggesting that our dreams might be the most honest archives we have. This is a poem that understands how past and present coexist in our bodies, our memories, and especially in our dreams.
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