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About this ebook
In Dream Apartment, Lisa Olstein builds a world of night-rabbits, bodiless shadows, and networks of wind where ode and elegy meet.
Devoted equally to the long arc and the sharp fragment, Lisa Olstein’s fifth collection maps the lucid ache at the center of night where “darkness stands in/for light,” certain heartbreaks never end, and love dovetails with losing. Immersed in ode as much as elegy, Dream Apartment employs a dynamic range of forms. Prayer-like spells cascade down the page with precision and abandon. Arrow-shot elegies explore the shock of suicide and find echoes in other kinds of grief—individual and communal, animal and ecological, sudden and creeping.
Agile narratives mirror the dazzling associative movement of unselfconscious thought, the dreaming mind, “bodiless memory.” Whether watching a stranger carry his dead dog out of a vet’s exam room or offering bouquets of peonies to night-foraging rabbits, Dream Apartment is propelled by the way poems, like dreams, unfold new dimensions of time and space. Casting their lines toward wish and repair, recognition and reckoning, these poems reveal how any meditation on loss is an exploration of love, promising that in “dreaming, something wakes.”
Author
Lisa Olstein
Lisa Olstein is a renowned author who specializes in poetry and nonfiction. She currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Dream Apartment - Lisa Olstein
\|/
FORT NIGHT
The snake is
a sleeve the deer
puts on its mouth
a beaded cuff
in the haze men
make of morning
with each release
of their fist-gripped
guns. Is this a dream
of shame is this
a dream of potential
unmet of possibility
undone? School
no pants brush
no teeth podium
no poems open
door all wall.
Dear Monster
none of the guests
we invited arrive.
In the darkness
no lion comes.
RABBIT RABBIT
I went to the city
and felt a fire
stitch into the fabric
of my days. The
crumbs I found
to eat in the crisp
gutters between
flames were good
as they burned
my throat. Tourniquet
etiquette is a way
of not bleeding
through the cloudy
bandage of each
drumming day—
no bridge of brays
and all the wrong
burrs stuck in this
coat becoming
someone else’s.
The stink of a man
is a lasting kiss
when you don’t
want to touch or be
touched. Evergreen
licorice is the mind
of the past
of the woods
in the wood.
ROOT
God made her
his vessel. No.
God made of her
a vessel. No.
The river poured
into her as if
a vessel. Yes.
God made of
her a raft. No.
Her child clung to
her as if a raft.
No. Clung to her
as a raft. Yes.
God made of her
a vassal. Yes
landless
river-pastured
root cut loose.
KISS
It’s true I
rue. I tore
myself apart
for you and you
loved to watch
me do it loved
to watch me
crack my hips
like a whip toss
myself skyward
seeding thunder
to the clouds.
It’s the brain
that feels the pain
it’s the body
that delivers it.
PLUM
To the ear
plum is
indistinguishable
from plumb
the way love
disappears before
no one’s eyes
exactly how
fathoms the line
plumbing the air
with the scent
of plums in green
morning not yet
mourning still
morning still
time.
/|\
APPARENT WINNER
Once the moon came close, brushed
its rough cheek to my face, but
before my eyes could adjust to the light
spilling gas-like, it was retreating again
into a more distant orbit. Is this where
I go when I don’t want to hear
the news or what passes for its fevered
breath, did I earn this morning’s calm,
no, that’s the medicine I took
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