Welcome! I’m Lex Orgera——poet, essayist, gardener, herbalist, editor——and this is Promptly, a creative prompt every week from a different author or artist to your screen.
Hi all,
I dreamed last night that my mom was giving Macy Gray voice lessons.
I dreamed last night that a sliding screen door shut on its own.
I dreamed of a very funny man I know, who I was using as a study partner for what I don’t know, but it involved a large basket.
I dreamed an ex frosted his hair and shaved its sides.
And so on and so forth goes the beautiful language of dreams. I went through a long period of not really remembering my dreams...and now that I can remember them again? I feel more alive, vibrant, and sort of like there’s a secret superpower to the dream world that I can tap into again. Which is what today’s guest Prompter does: captures the magic of dreams through poetry (which, lets face is, IS the language of dreams).
Today’s Promptly is brought to you by the Land of Sleep and the Dream Ambassador himself, poet and artist Mathias Svalina.
The Prompt
Some poems are shadows. But if you lift a shadow up, like a rotten log, you’ll find more poems squirming in the dirt below. Be careful, though, when dropping your shadow back onto the forest floor. If your shadow breaks, the pieces will be baby shadows. Baby shadows are horrible with hunger.
1. Take your shadow in your embrace.
2. Hold your shadow as tight as you can.
3. So tight your shadow makes a hole in the world.
4. Step through the hole your shadow makes in the world.
4. When you emerge, your arms are empty.
5. The poem is what you’ve carried through yourself.
6. The poem is the sweetness emptiness releases.
The Writer
Mathias Svalina is a writer & runs the Dream Delivery Service wherein you can subscribe to receive dreams every day, either in the mail or by hand (he travels around a lot and delivers dreams via bicycle). In his website’s words, the Dream Delivery Service is “a nomadic literary arts project of permeable dreaming, delivering daily dreams to subscribers for a month at a time.”
His project is one of the coolest, most original around, and seems to have just bubbled up from the deepest reaches of our collective psyche.
Here’s a great poem of Svalina’s called “Dream” from Poetry Magazine.
Mathias on plants
I don’t really write about plants, except as “plants.” I don’t have a mind that can identify many things as things in the real world, which makes my relationship to plants somewhat gauzy, though universally adorative. The real world is more difficult to see than the other thing.
Big ol’ hugs and wild dreams,
Lex