KARLA LAMB / BATHROOM SERIES with RECURRING DREAM
Recurring Dream
I’m alone looking for the father. I can’t swim. Memory: the father had once thrown me at the waves, where I sand-gagged. Never learned. Here, in this dream, the father is swimming. In a pool. An inground pool, level with the street. The inground pool is in the middle of the street. The street empty. Like in dreams. Like in Barcelona. Where we are. Where the street being dreamt about is. The street being dreamt about currently is long & empty. I am the child looking for the father. I don’t know the father is swimming. The edge of the pool, where I am, is as shallow as the street, an inch deep. The water, light blue, laps in inch tall waves. The pool increasingly deepens. It inclines down, gets deeper & deeper. Alone, I am walking along the retaining walls of the pool. The retaining walls are really a sidewalk. The sidewalk I am walking on surrounds the pool, level with the street. Memory: the father had once thrown me into a pool, not the pool currently being dreamt about. That was Los Angeles. Where the father tried to teach me again how to swim. By throwing me in. I gagged for air. In the dream I skip along the retaining walls of the deep end of the pool. A faint outline, at first, then a dark shadow. A shark is swimming in the pool. The shark is supposed to be in the pool. The dream allows for things to be okay with a shark in the deep end of the street pool. I see the shark swimming up. I am a child alone at the deep end of a pool, alone, in the street. Remember: the father is also in the pool. I think I see both the father & the shark. I think I feel that the shark knows I am watching it swim. I think I feel that the father knows he is not mine. The street empty, still. I cannot help the father. I am a child. I can’t swim. I can only reach. I think I try to reach.
Karla Lamb is a multidisciplinary Chicana poet and artist. Her work has appeared in A Women’s Thing Magazine, The Shallow Ends, Coal Hill Review, Vox Populi, Word Riot, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Uppagus, Rogue Agent, and Voices from the Attic Anthology. Lamb earned an MFA from Carlow University, and is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript. Lamb lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she is a program manager for City of Asylum, an organization that provides sanctuary to endangered writers. She has edited for After Happy Hour Review, and can usually be found collaborating with various artists and writers.