(Un-numbered)

The Grass’s Dream

written by Mathias Svalina with Kenny Vincent

It is raining. Rain sticks to my blades like bubbles of glass. I stretch & shiver the drops down my skin. The dirt grows wet & undifferentiated. My roots swell. Water fills me. I know this water. I’ve met it many times before, over centuries as it has passed into & out of me. I am very young to the water, which has all been here for billions of years, but the water is kind to me, patient with my chittering animation. The rain keeps falling & falling until the scene shifts & I am at dinner with a beautiful human woman. Red wine in two glasses. Flowers in a vase. I ask her what she wants. I want the steak, she says. The server comes to the table. She orders the steak. The server turns to me. Water, I say. No ice. And sunlight. No clouds. And a mélange of the decomposing matter of dead mammals & insects & rotting vegetation. The woman smiles. I try to smile back, but I am grass & it comes out wrong. And then later in the dream I am moving out of my mother’s house. She has kicked me out. I pack flimsy cardboard boxes full of colors. I carry the boxes past her as she stares at me angrily. I take all my colors to this park. I open the boxes & unpack the colors. At first I place them in precise places, the yellows & the purples in the flower beds. The pinks & oranges in the morning & evening skies. But then precision seems less important than the colors themselves, than having them all out of the boxes, & I fling the colors everywhere, covering the passing cars & the clouds & the autumn leaves & the spring sprouts & the seagulls & the littered of plastic bags & the worms. Thunder booms. The sky clouds over. When the rain comes, it lifts the colors up & swirls them until everything is every color at once.