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
Jorge López Llorente is a bilingual writer from Madrid (Spain), who studied English Literature at the University of Oxford. His debut poetry collection, Los ojos desdibujados, is out with Cuadranta. His other poetry and fiction appeared in Under the Radar, New Critique, Wildfire Words and The Citron Review, as well as on Spain’s National Radio (RNE).