December
In Sweden a man whispers my name
and wants to lie down with me in a field of tulips.
But in Sweden it’s mostly winter
and they don’t really have tulip fields.
The man has a fever and thinks
snowflakes bleed loneliness.
For weeks he dreams he is a reindeer
and I am the goddess of both the hunt and chastity.
When you love a person, you want them
to leave you, so that you can dream of them…
wrote Max Voloshin to Marina Tsvetaeva.
I agree -
trapped in that man’s dream
I want to wake
long before the bullet I shoot
at the reindeer
returns to me.
Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness’s tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. She is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for her debut haiku volume While Dreaming Your Dreams. Moon flogged, her full length debut poetry collection, will be out with Broken Sleep Books in 2024.
