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Avalon
  • Home
  • Spring 2025
    • Poetry
      • A Soulmate
      • All the Globe's a Stage
      • At The Water's Edge
      • Big Sisters
      • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
      • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
      • Foolish Lemons
      • I Know Icarus
      • nightstand as self-portrait
      • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
      • Pasiphaë
      • Poem for a Stranger
      • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
      • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
      • Sanctuary
      • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
      • Year of the Frog
      • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
      • Your Haiku
    • Fiction & Plays
      • Calculated Sympathy
      • Indigo
      • Maurice
      • The Cradle
      • The Hollow Room
    • Visual Art
      • A Farmer in Vinales Cuba
      • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
      • Thank you, please come again
      • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
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        • Foolish Lemons
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        • nightstand as self-portrait
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        • Pasiphaë
        • Poem for a Stranger
        • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
        • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
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        • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
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 Spring 2023     Poetry 

The Nightmare's Lullaby

Gabrielle Koon

What is a dream—
But a shadow in the night
A waving of reference,
And the eclipsing of light.

In fantastical calm,
a boat sets off
On a long stream of rivers
Converging at the shore’s bed,
Graceful hands dipping into the stream
Pouring pots into a head.

From the water,
Only green plants grow,
Only stars reflect in the ocean coast.
And one can look at the sky

Without wanting to row.

But waters aren’t always calm,
In fact, they rarely are far from the coast.
Here lies a different type of dream,
A ship that never sets aflight.
The dreams we bury in the trenches of our minds
In still, deep blue-black,
Outgrowing a repressed, weeded vine.

Where clock towers wade,
In the water’s waves.
Set to midnight, for moments of strange
shadows glooming over the
glaring light of moving time.
As bells chime the final ring,
The siren song starts to sing,

Pools of chaos arrive,
The kind of nature to overtakes the human,
Letting no bodies survive.

In these waters, no one can claim the blue their own.
Blooming fire runs far below.
Under the cracks of earth
and the tears of time
This is what the mind calls reality,
But the soul calls lies.

We drown in these waters,
As breathe picks up in your chest
The constant grinding teeth,
Heard when laying your head to rest.

As the hands rise, and you fall
Pulling your voice under, melodies dry your world
The water covers your eyes, your mouth calls
Red clay mud, over the throat of dirt
Until, at last,
The midnight memories conquer the golden stories.

Dreams; the mind’s sight,
Bursting, and black as mine.
Sing me a lullaby
For those dark shadows of time.
Sing me a lullaby
For the nightmares of my mind.

Sing me a lullaby,
For a dream—
Goodnight.

A Letter to my Parents

A Life of Fiction

Answers

Black Spirit

Giving In

I have a question!

I think of you

Light's Secret

Murky Middle

Once Upon a Push Pin Heart

Origami Horses

Road Trip

Shadow's Descent

She Gets to Live

Shenandoah Spring

Silver Linings

Something Within

spinning

SU

supernova

The Epitaph of Stolen Words

The Nightmare's Lullaby

The Society of Lost Fathers

To Be

Young Black Bunny

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