Elisa Gabbert

AWAKE & ALONE

Am I in the wrong history?

I thought in a dream where I watched an instant replay with a contrary outcome to the one
I’d just witnessed.

But the replay in the dream was as real as the dream.

When I’m only alone asleep, I try to reach aloneness through sleep.

Being alone is first position.  

The other day, alone in a room with my friend Mike he said

What are you doing this weekend?  

And after a pause I said

Who, me?  

The weird part was, he didn’t even think it was weird.

It is so much easier to sit and think in a bar alone than at home.  

In a bar where I am not alone

I can remember every thought I’ve ever thought

And they come back to me, as thoughts, as real as the dream.  

But now I am awake.

Now that I am finally alone.

ELISA GABBERT is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG) and The Word Pretty (Black Ocean). She writes a regular poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver.