The Dream Queen by Paula Anderson

TBN was broadcasting an old and poorly technicolored production of Romeo and Juliet... Romeo was talking of his love... and how he dreamed of her and Mercutio was answering his friend... “O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you: She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than a n agate-stone on the forefinger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomi over men's noses as they lie asleep.
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Fear tickled the back of John’s throat. He didn’t want to be there, not tonight, not in that dark alley. A warm fire, a good book and smooth whiskey waited for him at home. He swallowed back the tickle and twitched the stress from his shoulders. It didn’t matter what he wanted, he had a job to do.

It's early winter, and I'm on a train heading south to Boston. Outside the window, beyond the pine trees and oak trees and elm trees and the overgrown brush slapping the train, all of it going by so fast it's hard to distinguish one thing from another, I look to a point in the distance where there's a ship in the harbor. It's one of those barges that carry things and have a bridge that looks like the silhouette of a small city skyline.

I slither back toward consciousness as my eyes adjust to the pulsating seizure-light, reminding me that a beer once swallowed is soon to seethe the world again. My skull says: Tough guys got irrigated with a shiv-canal and sent up the river to swim for it. 'Forgiveness sometimes comes in subtle shades,' she said from some darkened corner. I replied that I was myself a shade, trapped for ever more in the underworld, where there is no parking between noon and 2pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays for street befouling. And who would blame them? They are no more than deep-sea creatures which live near ultra-hot gas exhausts on the ocean floor. The water they drink would boil you alive.

In the early morning, it almost seemed that a layer of steam hung over the camp, providing a symposium of moisture for the insects between us and the mounting warmth of the west-coast sun. Here we were, beneath the insects, muddling our way out of sleep, awakened by the thrill of our shared experience at the Clayoquot Sound Peace Camp. Vanguards in the trenches of the modern environmental movement of 1993, we saw ourselves as a last stand, soldiers here to save the old growth forests we could almost see from the camp. However, clinging to morning rituals from our forsaken urban homes, daybreaks inspired less-than-heroic moments well worth sharing.

the kind of feeling
where you pull the comforter close
to your legs & lips, pretend
you're the black and white stitches
so if someone walks into your room
they see the clumps of sheets