In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive

Thank you, Elizabeth von Radics, for being both my mom and my most eager copyeditor.

Thank you, Shay Alexi, for your tender bitch brilliance.

Thank you, Patty Rice and the entire team at Andrews McMeel, for believing in me twice.

The poem Altar was written after a workshop with Jessica Helen Lopez.

Multiple poems in this book, as well as its title, were inspired by Jenny Holzer’s truism: In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive And You Were Full of Joy.

This life is such a heaven I forget to notice.

If I could tell my younger self anything
about this life: we do so much more
than just survive it.

with its full kitchen its full bookshelves,
sharing my bed with the kind of love
I used to close my eyes and wish for.

. I didn’t plan to bitch
about a kind of life I once believed impossible,
to trudge through the rain back to my home

I’m still here. I know this because it hurts
and I’m so grateful. I didn’t plan to be alive
this long. I didn’t plan to eat good food I bought
with poems.