ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, and her first full-length poetry collection, Tasty Other, is forthcoming in November as the 2016 winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Verse Daily, and many other journals and anthologies.
Also by Katie Manning:
Tasty Other
The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman
I Awake in My Womb
Tea with Ezra
September 14, 2016
Baby Dream #22: The Stranger
I watch my new baby sleep. I watch until
her eyes open. I say, "Good morning, baby.
Are you hungry?" "Yeah!" the baby says
in a sweet high voice, and I'm so happy
my newborn can talk. This will save some time.
I offer my breast to the baby, who has become
a boy. He eats greedily. Strangers walk
through the room, which has become
a hotel lobby, but no one sees us. Then one
tall man in a trench coat walks straight for us
across the room. He is too close. "Can I be next?"
he says and stares, making slurping sounds.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I had some incredibly vivid and bizarre dreams. In true poet fashion, I decided to write them down and use them as fodder for poems. "Baby Dream #22: The Stranger" is part of the sequence of 39 poems that I created from these pregnancy anxiety dreams, and it's one of my favorites for its shiftiness and disturbing conclusion.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
