TORI GRANT WELHOUSE 

o /Ÿ men

1: Crows croup the sky with their hinky

    ca-co-phony.

2: They eek me to pieces, wakeful, worried.

3: Caulk the character

     of days, weeks,

     carrying calamity.

4: Scour the four corners,

     scavenging for could-be corpses,

     carrion worth pecking.

5: Bleak. Black. Beak.

6: Colorless eyes roll;

     a heart infarcts.

7: Shadowkeepers calibrate

    time.

    a. Calling "Lack, Lack, Lack."

    b. Son-dialing, a new one

        casts off his snakeskin.

In recent years the membrane between sleep and wakefulness has become more transparent, and I began remembering my dreams in more detail—vivid and almost complete. With help from a Dream Dictionary, received as a gift from a sister I lost too early, I started a series of "dream" poems, delving deeper into the dreams, dredging for meaning. This is one example.

Tori Grant Welhouse received her MFA from Antioch International in London. She now lives in the rural midwest where she is a Regional Director for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (WFOP) and coordinates the poetry reading series Imagine! She recently published a chapbook Canned with Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has also appeared in Literary Mama, The Greensboro Review, anderbo.com, Melusine, Verse Wisconsin, Broad! and Glassworks. One of her poems received Honorable Mention in this year’s Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize Contest. Her writing “manifesto” has always been these lines from Erica Jong: “If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.”