LatinosUSA

“Dreamescapes” navigates the volatile interplay between the poetry of imagination and the numbing churn of capitalist routine. Waves of dream images break into various characters’ minds before they break down like the surf, from Roy Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl” to a Walter Mitty-esque jaded travel agent, washing away gray reality but leaving murky sediment.

Dreams may drown or deliver. Here they do both, always vivid, sometimes violent, never still.

This poetry chapbook is the English-language debut of Jorge López Llorente, a bilingual writer from Madrid who studied English Literature at the University of Oxford. It includes blackout poetry, prose poems and a sequence of increasingly irregular sonnets, with an experimental combination of modern and traditional forms, in both narrative and lyrical verse, adding to Llorente’s poetry and fiction published in UK, US, Canadian, European and Latin American magazines and shortlisted for UK and Spanish prizes.

Sample Pieces

Dreamcatcher

Your eyes can’t avoid the thing you gifted to your pre-teen self: a dreamcatcher. A plastic spiderweb, in a perfectly symmetrical flower-like pattern, harder than it looks, with feather-like tufts hanging from it, all tinted ultramarine blue. Decoration. A fake one, without any pretense. Barely an echo of its original name or purpose. Holes of silence in its personal significance. You have come to think it has bad energy or, even worse, no energy at all. Only dust. You don’t even dream anymore under it. Can’t remember. But you sit on the unmade bed and make up what could have stolen into your mind through the feathers and the web holes, what other sleepy dust could have washed over it:
aloft stones cast into a lake of ripples nazar eye floaters breathlessness undrowning daddy longlegs skinny-dipping in kids’ games dunking underwater splashing slick in frozen-over waves of shouting inflatables wet plastic wrapping stuck ashore hide-and-seek castles made of sand slip adrift as the song goes made anew sought but hidden again adrift.

~~

A few weeks into the dreams

Back then, a few bodies ago, you knew how to get your dreams delivered. You would sleep in the shape of a question mark and the empty side of the bed would be the silent answer. Now the silence is broken by you answering the door late, groggy. Now dreams are strangers’ hands, with covered faces, leaving a parcel on the doorstep, untouched, which you find too late, with the doorbell’s ring muffled. You’re asking for more than you need. You lie that it’s broken and you’re reimbursed and keep these dreams. You lie to yourself: you don’t want them, you don’t know where to put them. Fragile, this way up, they are now half-used and tucked beneath your unmade bed. Now the dreamfulness wakes you up at odd hours of the night, with that shudder as if you’re dreaming that you’re falling or flying and then stop. Nothing is enough; the nothing is too much. You can’t say no to them, although you can’t say yes to them and follow them through; that would spoil these dreams. Besides, they’re not even yours. Kind of. Sleeping with outdoor clothes on has got you dreaming of the bubble wrap these dreams came in. You never finish bursting the bubbles; your room smells of plastic. In the next few sleeps, you want no more dreams, you want the sound of burst bubbles instead; not foam, but seconds of spindrift spittle. Throw it all out except the wrapping. A choking hazard. Only then can you wrap it all up, forget all the forgetting, stop feeling those dreams and that body as your own. Sleep on your back, straightened, correctly, staring at the ceiling. Sleep like a few bodies ago, some body on a commute, delivered, daydreaming of no longer dreaming, onwards, straight ahead, correctly. The bubbles don’t all burst.

~~

Drowning Girl
After Roy Lichtenstein

A typical gasp.
The reverb of a dampened cry, perhaps just
a whisper to the blank sky unseen above:
I’d rather sink… With hair colored Klein bluish;
with hushed open lips not finished yet, folded in
ruby origami, closed off from the ocean’s
expanse; with closed eyes, nervous fingers.
An unfelt wreckage,
an “I don’t care!”,
but just look, look at such pretty loss.
The pain is out of the frame;
the melodrama is in full view.
Typically, a gasp is due.
Another soap opera, the very picture of loss, a sea
of troubles foams before our eyes: thick-lined tear pearls
like aspirins dissolving as they drop,
not quite bubbly, about to be stirred,
gulped down and washed away,
in a stylized pulpy fiction
on a blue cushion of sleekly painted, suspended despair
for one to gape at, before moving on
to the next passion,
the next item.
A strained sigh still echoes, though.
But she does sink, and there was no Brad,
no drama, no throb.
Just beauty,
left alone.
All alone.
(Sigh!)

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