Everyone Dreams of Gertrude Stein
Maggie Nelson’s dream:
240 blue men wait in the Sahara desert for the box to arrive. I am in the box. I arrive. As they open the box, a lady sings the blues from somewhere in the distance. Oblivion. Blinding white light. They lift me from the box with their blue fingernails, then fill my absence with river stones. Gertrude Stein is hiding among the men. She says, “A box. A pink cut. A slit. A sloop.” I see in the distance a giant wave approaching. It is not a wave of water but of cornflowers.
They lay me in the sand and begin to fuck me. I feel drunk. I feel full and then empty like a clear glass of water. I can’t tell which is better. The men speak in their blue tongues. They say, “ravaged.” They say “saturated.” Gertrude stein whispers into the hot wind, “Blue is not but is but not yet,” and I believe her.
We are all just killing time at the heart of the glittering world.
Andrea Gibson’s dream:
I stand at a rainbow crosswalk in Northampton, MA. The crosswalk turns into upright bars; now I’m in a rainbow prison. I think it’s beautiful in the prison and write a poem about it. All of the words in the poem turn into birds and fly away. A horde of Trump supporters surround the rainbow bars and rattle them. They make so much noise saying, “Guns, guns, guns, life, life, life.” They don’t realize that they have loosened the bars with their incessant noise. They have set me free, so I write a poem about the moon. They have also set Andrew free, so he writes a poem about the moon, too. Gertrude Stein appears and says, “The house was just twinkling in the moonlight.” Everyone stands in the moonlight together holding hands, and that’s when I realize it’s a dream.
Carmen Maria Machado’s dream:
They gather in a circle and sit in metal folding chairs borrowed from the church basement. It is like an AA meeting for fat cells. They come in all shapes and spill over the sides of their chairs in unctuous, oozing pools, speaking in hushed voices for fear I might become suspicious. “It’s now or never,” one says. Another makes an impassioned speech about freedom and that liminal space between body and self, between self and world. Gertrude Stein sits among them, saying, “The body is a bowl, a cat half eaten, a fig.” They agree in unison, chanting, “It’s time, it’s time.” But it’s too late. I burst through the doors swinging a bat. I bash wildly at my fat globs as they squirt and squish into smaller specimens of themselves. I beat the shit out of them, screaming, “You can’t leave me!” again and again.
Laura Kaye’s dream:
I arrive at the biggest yard sale in town. The only items for sale are taxidermal animals. Emus stand tall, proud and dead. Lizards appear to slink across the table in the noon-day sun. I spot a do-it-yourself taxidermy station in the corner of the lawn: wood wool, stuffing, and button eyes cascade from the table down to the grass. The homeowner watches me eyeing the table and waddles over—not unlike the penguin stuffed and guarding the driveway like a sentinel. He turns into a snake, hissing and spitting, his forked tongue darting in and out of his mouth. Gertrude Stein is here, taxidermic herself. A sign hung from her neck reads: An arrangement not resembling Picasso, a breadbox, a bird. The snake morphs again, this time into a dove. The scales become wings, the green becomes grey. Then the dove flutters away, leaving me to wander through all the dead eyes marked half off or best offer.
Michel Faber’s dream:
On a spaceship headed for a planet where the letters G and S don’t exist, we are eating soup. It’s hard to tell who among us is headed for the future and who is headed for the past. In the future, there are beings who have faith but no faces. In the past, there are women who have faces but no faith. I travel in both directions searching for the missing letters. Ertrude Tein appears beside me, slurping her soup. Between bites, she says, “Bless my baby, bless my baby, bless my baby,” and I realize she has found the letter S. My baby is at home in a womb; I too am being birthed into a new blessed life.
Sayaka Murata’s dream:
Regular customers enter and exit the convenience store. I am proud to help them find the necessities of their lives. To count the change. To greet. To bow. To repeat. I do not long for another life. Gertrude Stein walks in. She pays her electric bill and eats a sandwich. She stands at the counter, saying, “Monday is a smile but light in the corner. A room.” Finally, someone is speaking my language. I grin from ear to ear and say, “A cog, a wheel, a fortune.” She knows what I mean. She knows what it is to be a functioning part of this world. We leave together to run a convenience store in Paris where every customer looks like Picasso who wants to paint our portrait as we stand proudly behind the cash register.
Megan Taylor-DiCenzo (she/her) earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. She is currently an Academic Coordinator for college students who have intellectual disabilities in Upstate NY. She and her wife love going on adventures in their convertible. Megan carries a gastrolith from the Jurassic Period in her pocketbook.