E. Thomas Jones
My Dream About a Bear
— after Lucille Clifton
Revisiting My Dream About a Bear
the bear is lucky I can’t hold
a crossbow — my aim
like my mother’s — we strike
every heart & target & I was ten
& threw a rock
at a boy for stealing my sandal
& on the way home
my mother told me of the time
her own brother
ducked from a stone she threw
that — as if magnetized
to skull — struck him — two boys
crying in my mind —
tongues in their hair & palms
slicked raspberry
the sandal back on my foot
I staggered
in playground mulch
I’m bleeding they wailed I’m bleeding —
my mother & I both
know the guilt of hurting someone
we know
these flashes of wild rage
& we say
I don’t mean harm — but this
boy & her brother
& the bear in my dream
all glare at us —
our arms & hands now
shafts & arrowheads.
Mama Says if I was a Zombie She’d Shoot Me in the Head
In a dream a bear tells me her answer
to the trolley problem, swings her paw
like a felled tree & roars for clemency.
Motherhood: if a bear is starving, she eats
her cub. A better mother than most,
this bear wants to spare them both. She
is grieving — not for the lost child,
but the child there, who asks questions
too hard to answer: What would you do
if I tried to eat you? Who, if either,
should be saved? I once tried to run away
from home only to linger on the porch
& play my Gameboy. Mama watched me
through the window. When I came inside,
a brewed storm spilling, she bruised me
in her arms & cried.