Maskless in Dallas, A Dream from 2020
My parents are riding a tour bus
past mansions, universities,
museums of the last Old Masters.
They visit a historic house
that is smaller and not quite as old
as the ones back East.
My parents avoid downtown,
Dealy Plaza, the crystal skyscrapers
on postcards, the grassy knoll,
the place where my mother says
everything went wrong.
Having overslept yet again, I wander
the aisles of a Barnes and Noble
that magically expands to an art gallery,
a toy store, a supermarket, all
without selling the book I want,
nature writing set in the hill country,
all that I will miss on the flight home.
Without that book, I walk out
to the shores of an artificial lake
large enough to be an ocean
with saltwater taffy and a Cyclone
at the end of the boardwalk.
I walk past the bare-chested men
and high-heeled women
who clog this path,
singing, spitting, swigging
beer from brown bottles.
I wake up gasping.
Copyright 2024 by Marianne Szlyk
A version of this poem appeared as “Maskless in Dallas” in Mad Swirl.
Marianne Szlyk’s poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Poetry X Hunger, Poetry Breakfast, Verse-Virtual, McQueen’s Quinterly, and One Art. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. Her poems have also been translated into Polish, Italian, and Cherokee. Her short stories have appeared in Impspired and Mad Swirl. She and her husband, the wry poet and flash fiction writer Ethan Goffman, now live in the Washington, DC area with their black cat Tyler.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
