Only Found in Dreams

Hal Y. Zhang

We return to the swamp quietly thus

to find our bug-eyed child-selves in thrall:

impossible fruiting tigers,

eidolon deaths and adamantine apocalypse.

We were all this young once, nodding along to every miracle, every horror,

until we walked too far

down the graveled road, feet stripped and raw. And

there is a comfort in crawling back in the cage and swallowing away the invisible key,

for the phantasmagoria here

cannot hurt us like our waking days.

Hal Y. Zhang is a physicist by day, and her poems have previously appeared or will appear in Strange Horizons, ellipsis..., Argot Magazine, and Lockjaw Magazine.