Aren’t dreams archives of light. Aren’t dreams mangled renditions of unswallowed facts. Your perverted caricature lugs a swaddled doll to a lonesome river. Stalks and fronds strand on burnished stones, making gills. The bank, one big fishbone. You aren’t sure if you’re running from or running to, feet absorbing fallen rattan teeth. The doll is laughing. Or maybe screaming. You feel it will burn out like dew as the day gets old. The cliff regurgitates pieces of itself, stacks jagged slabs as if a wind giant is arranging them into cairns. Aren’t dreams destruction. Aren’t dreams introduction. You arrive at the water. Sheer, or maybe so black there seems to be no life underneath. Your face is drawn on the doll’s with crushed cochineal. When you submerge its spongy body beneath, the breath bubbling pops with tangs of persimmon. The act is one you beat your soul against, repeatedly, until a hatch spawns through your dream eyes. Crying, you pull the frozen doll to your chawed nipple. It coughs out its brief oblivion. Years from now, when she is sixteen like you are in this moment, the doll will ask you about this shared reverie. You recalibrate the details. Ngerteni ora? There is no excuse, just the desperation to save the doll from what it can’t understand. You will laugh because it’s the only salve. And when the doll tells the story of her attempted murder, she will pageant it as a jest.