POEM OF THE MONTH | MARCH:
DREAMS
Lunula by Derek Mueller
Dreaming as Evidence
Margarita Cruz
Margarita Cruz is a part-time educator, president of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, and contributor for the Arizona Daily Sun. She has received support from the Tin House Writer's Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Macondo and others. Her works have been featured in Ploughshares, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day series among others.
Contributor’s Note
I tend to think of memory as circular, which often translates itself as being able to explore narratives in dream-like landscapes. In memory and in dream, there's a lot to play around with as we uncover truths about ourselves, histories or our families--we get to reimagine how the story went or understand what actions in the past might have actually meant. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time looking up what dreams meant in dream dictionaries because I had once been told that everything in our dreams comes from something we once knew so now I spend time navigating my own past through poetry that moves through these dreamlands in search of understanding my own histories. There is truth in our dreams.
Editor’s Note
Margarita Cruz’s “Dreaming as Evidence” mesmerizes with its dreamlike structure that mirrors memory’s circular nature. What captivates me most is how the poem’s form — with its indentations creating a visual cascade — physically embodies the way memories spiral and nest within one another. Cruz masterfully weaves together fragments of family history: “an uncle, once a wound on the porch,” (ah!) fathers who “forgot how to religion,” and that striking moment of recognition in the rearview mirror. I love how the repetition in the final stanzas transforms earlier lines into evidence itself, creating a sort of poetic DNA test that reveals inheritance as both blessing and burden. The line “evidence of a dream where everyone is still alive” delivers an emotional punch that reverberates back through the entire poem, suggesting that our dreams might be the most honest archives we have. This is a poem that understands how past and present coexist in our bodies, our memories, and especially in our dreams.