On Dreams and Poems

Strange how dreams
and poems work,
how everything mixes
together, and some of  

it isn’t real. The way you tell
is to test it against 
what literally has been 
said, and what has been 
left out. And somewhere 

in the whitespace, 
among characters 
and punctuation, 
(or absence of either one),

survives an aerial truth
of who we might have been
were we ever given flowers 
before being handed the storm.

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright March 4, 2024, all rights reserved