Joani Reese
FEVER DREAM
In the dark, the collector, cape and hood painted black, knocks three times at my sick mother’s door. He salutes the vast heavens, leans his scythe towards the wall, then saunters to her bedside to finesse her withdrawal from the world. His skeletal hands stroke her whisper-fine hair; he waits for the nurse to be busy elsewhere, then he shuffles her memories and settles himself down to read her as though she’s a book to be shelved. He stares from her eyes that have grayed from the green, takes her life for a test drive, wants to see what she’s seen. She dozes, attached to her breathing machine. Stealing dreams, he will visit the people she’s been.
Disturbance starts ruffling the hospital air as another shade enters, slaps death’s hand from her hair. My father’s appeared, though my father’s long dead, and she weeps for his loss, but she speaks to his shade. He warns her to wake and to shake off the ghoul who will sever each thread binding body to soul. Early light filters in; green eyes flutter open. Though she searches each corner for father, he’s gone, and the specter dissolves, leaving her death undone. She’s not ready, she says to a room shedding night and envisions her future in the rising daylight. For the next twenty years she’ll recount her escape with the help of my father, keeping her from the grave.
Joani Reese is from Texas. Her chapbooks are Final Notes and Dead Letters. Night Chorus is Reese’s full-length collection. Reese was poetry editor for THIS Magazine and Connotation Press, and fiction guest editor for Scissors and Spackle. Reese won the 1st Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize, The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis, and the Glass Woman Prize. She curates the AWP underground reading series Hot Pillow in its 13th year.