I took this picture a week or two after moving to Alabama, more to show how I set up the room than to demonstrate the light. But look at that window. It's bright and green and streaming, where the window is now simultaneously gone. I have tramped through this room after the doors were removed and the dark swarming tiles piled in the corners, pipes out, damp leaves on the floor.

I wrote in my writing journal this morning: I can’t speak to dreams-as-prediction, but I do think that dreams, coming from the unconscious mind, dredge up thoughts/anxieties/memories and represent those things both directly and indirectly. I think the tower of my dreams that had felt so safe and green was somehow my writing, and now it is my writing that’s out of reach. Even if my unconscious was trying to say something else, the act of dream interpretation reveals the unconscious. I know that’s the truth. I feel away from my writing, though I keep trying to approach it. Every approach is unstable: a rocking floating platform, a tiny raft that gives under my weight.

Then inexplicably I wrote a poem. The mouse in our kitchen made an appearance.

i approach the house and she spins away from me keyless

Last night I dreamed of approaching the tower from my recurring dream, of green light and safe space and the illuminated hotel lobby that feels like home—the tower always looks a little different, but it is identifiably the tower. I think here about Bachelard and the tallest point in any house, the well-lit garret. It's the place of elevated thought, heightened reason, closeness to light, airiness. In the dream I had to approach the tower by water, a channel that ran through a city, by stepping onto a small raft that would take me there, and I stepped off the dock with my arms full of books and sank into the water instead. The books weighed me down and I considered not letting them go, but I had to in order to get to the surface. It didn't occur to me until after I woke up that they were already ruined.

The tower appeared in another recent dream, this time a giant buoy at the end of an arduous harbor-side trail. I stepped onto the platform and it rocked back into the water, and I saw that there was no door, and the water washed back and forth over me as I refused to leave.

Years ago, my recurring dreams were of giant, deadly dark waves and sinister bodies of water, and it is disconcerting to see my old, bad recurring dream combined with my new one, the one that is inexplicably happy and safe. The hotel is gone—the tower turns away from me, not a safe place for me but a place safe from me. I think here of Baba Yaga / Baba Yaga's house, the denial of entrance, my own poetic confusion of occupant and intruder, the woman who is both old and young, good and bad, a helpful obstacle.

I have no background in dream analysis. But writing dreams down feels worthwhile. These days it's the most reliable of my creative acts, not including the act of dreaming itself.

imagine here a sound of disgust

What Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/30/ruth-bader-ginsburg-write_n_5544111.html

When I first started working on Doors of New Jersey, I felt compelled to apologize for writing about women. For years, I've avoided writing emotionally, because I was told early on that emotions and sentiment make for bad writing. Let's not pretend that emotion and sentiment don't go hand in hand with a stereotype of female writing and the female perspective. Let's not pretend that the ruling in this case was just, or fair, or appropriate, or good. Let's not pretend that writing about women isn't important, or that women's rights are not an issue.

I've been trying to write a little journal-like thought at the top of the page in my writing journal, an appetizer for my brain for each day that I sit down to write. I just now realized I should have been blogging those. Here's today:  

Today is my birthday! 7 minutes to write. I spent most of my time this morning reading poems in lit journals, because I feel most like writing when I’ve been reading. I wasn’t super in love with anything I read today, though. A week ago I read a Sasha Fletcher poem in Big Lucks and that was the last thing I was gaga about. I have a few books coming to me in the mail, to review, but otherwise I think I’ve read almost every book I have already.

HA. It’s hilarious that I just said that. There’s no way that that’s true.

And then I wrote. So it seems useful. I've always needed a small push to get started, so it's good to know that about myself and work with it, instead of against it.

A poem of mine is up in Sundog Lit's new issue! It is very exciting because I like this poem, even though I wrote it several years ago and it got rejected a lot, and now it finally has a home. Also, it's next to Shane McRae poems in the table of contents, which makes me flap my hands a little. Tomorrow I'm going to spend some morning hours just sitting around and writing whatever. I'm embarrassed to say that it will be the first time in a while that I've done this. I keep falling asleep at 9:30, and spending my days at work, and spending my days off going to Ikea, but tomorrow! tomorrow is the day.

This morning I'm rereading Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, which I grabbed from the free pile in the grad lounge a few days before we left (of course, we were packing up everything we owned and actively trying to get rid of books, but I had to take it). The MFA who owned it previously has written notes in the margins here and there, and now I'm realizing why this bothers me so much. In prose works, little notes have always distracted me, but in poetry they drive me a little batty. The page is important, the shape is important, the balance of text and empty space is important, and so, etc, the little notes are like the bug smears on the windshield of my Penske truck that the inadequate wiper fluid never wiped away.

Last night, the first night in our new apartment in Philadelphia, was the best night of sleep I've had in two weeks.

This is my new wooden hand, which I just purchased in New Orleans. I'm going to choose to believe it is lucky.

And funnily enough, with all the tornado memories in the air, the clouds destabilized and we've had more tornadoes. We were lucky in Tuscaloosa not to have any major damage last night, but B and I spent at least an hour huddled on the bathroom floor while the sirens went off and I could hear something, maybe imagined, that sounded like a vehicle that travels by track. When the weatherman first said the words "strong tornado" I felt ill. B and I have officially decided to move to Philadelphia post-MFA and while there are many things I'll miss, this won't be one of them. We both expressed the strangeness of this kind of bookending of our time here--storms in and storms out--but neither of us could really find a narrative to make it worth something. The time between has been the perfect opposite of destructive.