A man
dreams with
his fist while a
woman dreams of
a soft green field where
an archer stands in profile
at a middle distance taking aim
with his bow. She is starting to
wonder if he will turn toward her,
if he is her slim emissary, when the
man shouts, thrashes, punches the
air, and brings his fist down on
her shoulder. She wakes, yells
him down. He asks, Did I do
that, or did you dream it?
She thinks, thanks to him
she will remember the
archer, the marriage
bed turning on
the arrow.
Lee Sharkey is the author of Calendars of Fire (Tupelo 2013) and three other full-length poetry collections. She is the recipient of the Abraham Sutzkever Centennnial Translation Prize, Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award, and the Maine Arts Commission’s 2010 Fellowship in Literary Arts and is the co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal.