forest dreams

Photo: "Anywhere" by Lynne Schmidt

forest dreams

I stare into a phantasmagoric pond in my dreams, with Neverland’s nightlights shining in my face and illuminating me like Rimbaud or Narcissus. A dewy daydream inside of a dream. A montage of malisons / maledictions draped halfway across our personages with a firefly tittering behind our spines / Love in wings touching our backs / a nightingale’s sweet harmony in tandem with the sloshing of my fingers against the ripples and you by my side.

Love was makeshift horror to the ones made up of overcasts, our tongues tied with incoherent letters stowed away in the drawers of our mouths. But we met each other, our blood interlocking like in the string of fate lore with my melodic spin to it-- soulmate theory in frilly ribbons all purple suffusing flusters and prose. I imagine myself in a dress like that, or a sleep-gown, my ankles warmed by springtime waters daubed in the hue of fever dreams and illustrious storybook tales. I feel as though I am in someone else’s made-up book, the wispy protagonist in the arms of her dearest lover, carving out our initials and evermores inside of tree stumps. Love as unfurling chapters, stretched out.

My fingers are interspersed in the ruffles of the dress, and I suppose that Love is a little like that, with its omnipresence . . .

i. the narrator looking upon us with a knife through our fingernails in search of the pinkest of blood pacts-- for Love is fairytale-light / think the fae’s pink laughter and their shining eyes / translucent.

ii. and i vow to be with you. and you vow to be with me, Love ministering the oneness in the mosaic of our bodies / unwinding the serpentine curls cuffing us against an anti-edenic garden.

iii. a prose ballad from my mouth to yours, dripping with rosewater between the spaces. i kiss you / i kiss you / i kiss you / i kiss you / i kiss you / i kiss you / pulling asunder.

iv. wearing the culminating pinkness on my ring-finger . . .

v. stumbling after the fireflies in a dream so ephemeral, Love sinking the intensity so far through the bodice, until we are both so full with Love, its letters overflowing our drawers in soft spillage. these silken sounds we desire.

vi. i gently touch the spine of this dress to become even more stained with a blush, a fever to the nth degree / a soft-spoken utterance. evermore.

~ Janice Kang / Eris Yeoul

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Janice Kang / Eris Yeoul is a Korean-American amorist, poet, & high school student. Her writing, which focuses on the intersection between love, hope, & trauma, can be found in Surfaces, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Expat Press, X-R-A-Y Magazine, & others. She is @ERISYEOUL on Twitter where she rambles in fragments about her love her K-pop & her lover-- or in the soft spaces of tea ceremonies, flowers, downpours, & shrines.