Jeanne Wagner

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Dream Navigation I

I ease into sleep like an octopus sliding
through the neck of a jar―                            

or else I sink down fathoms past staghorn
corals, past sea whips.           

Other times, I’m not so seaworthy,
it’s more like I’m on the run―                                  

slipping across a border, or boarding a train
from a country I’ve never been to―             

or stowing away on a plane caught on
a radar screen―                     

making the kind of blip-blip sounds I imagine
an electron makes―                                                  

when doing its quantum leaps, or the echoes
dolphins use when lost―                              

times it seems I’ve fallen from the sky,        
pearling on a drop of rain―                                      

or I’ve tunneled through the ground like                   
a star-nose mole―                                                     

swimming blind through an airy loam
more like sky than the real sky―                              

my body dissolving in its own darkness,
hapless as a shooting star.      

Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.