This piece is by mentee alum, Mona Haddad. We honor her passing as a brilliant writer who touched everyone who knew her.
Interpretations
By Mona Haddad, Girls Write Now Mentee, Class of 2009
Conversations can be funny
things. Words fly out faster than your thoughts
can think them and before you know it, you’re pulling
out your handbook, the interpreter of dreams,
the bible of barely sleepy mornings.
Interpret this: in the early morning,
I crave twenty-five hour days and funny
nights of coffee highs and kit-kat bars. I yearn for new colors, for new thoughts
so different, I must feel them with all five senses, pulling
myself through a world found only in dreams.
In my dreams,
pandas write poetry and the moon struggles, against its neurotic impulse, to leave you come
morning.
Snowmen buy freezers and hang out til winter, and funny
bones tell prophecies like the oracles of Delphi, conveying the thoughts
of someone you don’t know, roping you in, and pulling.
I checked the index to find an explanation, pulling
each page until I reached the Ps. Your dream
book has no pandas. It says that dreams of cloudy mornings
will bring you luck, but mine have no clouds, only funny
animals who speak in iambic pentameter to express their racing thoughts.
If you can’t interpret dreams, interpret thoughts.
Tell me why the sky falls dark, why my words never fly but limp, pulling
punctuation, dragging against my dreams,
fighting the night till morning.
Interpret war, interpret broken traffic lights. Tell me why you always laugh; interpret the meaning
of “funny.”
Tell me a funny; make light of my thoughts.
Bring me out of the forces pulling me, tainting my waking, marring my dreams.
It’s late now; we’re tired. Let’s interpret this in the morning.