My dream doesn’t come at night, only when I sit on the bus and watch moss cling to the trees. Feeling so cold, it comes when my hands are so empty that everything I touch slips through, when I let hunger whisper in me. So there’s this dream and it comes when I peel oranges for myself, with love, but it always tastes sweeter peeled by other hands. So I want you in my home but I am too afraid to open the door, knowing I can’t triple lock it behind us and force you to stay. How do you say hello when you are practicing your goodbyes? How do you let someone walk into the kitchen and out again?
In my dream I wash dishes in our kitchen and someone has found a home in me, and the breath I have been holding for years softens in my chest. I dream over and over, I cook us soup, I cut the potatoes small because I care about you, I fall in love with the rhythm of this small knife and with feeding us. I cook with extra garlic because you’re like me and we promised to live deliciously. I wash your hair and you wash mine, and you take your strength off like armor and leave it outside. When I give up on dreams I still think of this faintly—persistent, buried in my chest—how brave it is to want anything at all.
Kaylee Ruiz
Poetry
BFA Animation 2024
Allentown, Pennsylvania
