Homeland
 
You dream I am dead and you visit me in heaven.  It's a place we can't sink, like water so salty we float without treading.  We cannot drown there even if we want to: there's no place else for the sodden soul to go.
 
Even in heaven the sky flashes at night, and we find our berth in an open-air greenhouse.  The flowers fold up and it's time for you to leave.  Your boss back on earth says you're going to be canned if you're ever late again.  When you tell me this dream still wet from your shower, I wish the morning had a shoulder I could hug beyond our own, a towel to guide the day with a vigorous rubdown.
 
I am the person you fear will die, and daily I earn my desire to be here.  It takes a sweeping out, a place to keep clean, no hijinks of the road.  Nothing deserves our mortal fear less than camping out by the wayside.  That's not the land of appointments, and I've got one tomorrow for an MRI.  I go crazy in that cylinder, like live ammunition.  But your dream boss relents and lets you come with me.  I expand the tight chamber with a vision of the sea in the translated novel you pull from your purse, I blink back at the curve I can fog with my breath, and I'm aware as the tube sucks me into its core of all of the ways I will never get out.
 
Yet I'll take the scant comfort.  If while I am in there the suitcase plutonium levels our city, I'll be close to the page you are reading when it happens.
 
we hear it again
at work on the roof patch
trying to get in


• Charles Hansmann's publication credits for 2007 include Frogpond, Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, The Lilliput Review, Contemporary Haibun, Contemporary Haibun Online, Simply Haiku, Shamrock Haiku Journal, Snap Poetry Journal. He holds degrees in English, philosophy and law – and sails a ketch called Crusoe.