First Dreams
by LeeAnn Pickrell
In the first dreams, the ones that found me here, in my home, away from that home where he raised me, he was not so far from death. Not the skin so translucent, so close to skeleton I had only bones to hold, but weak, needing my help, and I was running late, held up, always behind, always on the verge of disappointing. Over this summer, he’s lost years and wrinkles. He’s my dad when he knew everything. In the latest, I was walking down Van Buren, two blocks from my apartment building. It was morning, a quiet that held the emptiness of a Sunday. Surprised to see him, I exclaimed, “But you’re dead. How can you be here?” “I am.” So I shrugged, accepting it, and we turned to walk together then—like we did when I was in and out of college and came back to live at home, the walks we took around the high school. “Don’t blow it,” he says. He knows me. How I’ll take a gift, and it not being everything, push it away.
LeeAnn Pickrell’s debut collection is Gathering the Pieces of Days from Unsolicited Press. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, most recently in One Art, The Prose Poem, and Unbroken. A poem from her book, “May, week 1,” received honorable mention in The Prose Poem contest. Her chapbook Punctuated was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press, and her book Tsunami is forthcoming in 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California. On Substack, she writes LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry (leeannpickrell.substack.com). See more at www.leeannpickrell.com.