Poetry by Jocelyn Jimenez

Edited by Leyna Hoang

In some incoherent winter end scene 

I came to consciousness when he asked me for some facts of intrigue. 

Like divinity or manifestation, my dreams of precognition 

that whisper to fadeouts, then spotlight centerstage. 

From unconscious to conscious, stomach sinking to floor 

the long take of a moment I’ve watched before, impaling into obscurity. 

Something I can’t uncover, how the night is more rooted in reality 

than I ever seem to be, how it sows and reaps and walks 

right past me. And on the contrary, how I am bound 

by illusion, enacting a ritual I never meant to enable. 

Slipping between realms, into the hallucinatory conscious 

where my visions are exhibited 

as some scene that I perform for the mirror, or speak into running water 

almost endlessly till the glass fogs. Unknowing of how I found myself 

awake in a fantasy I cannot conjure beyond the 

buzz of the bulb or blackened window pane. 

Something of survival to escape the daylight 

to talk to air or shut eyes. 

In casual theatrics, we act as if we already are.

Binding into bed sheets or behind closed curtains. Wishing, 

in some never fully fledged attempt, that we’ll arrive before we truly do. 

Or spend the rest of our lives wondering what will transcend the hazed darkness 

and slip into our waking hours.