In the elevator dream, numbers have no meaning, and names,
instead of illuminating live beings, stand in boxes,
colorless. People waiting for the elevator fade into echoes.
Revealed, this vestibule opens to nothing, unrooted,
airless, without bud. When its doors close,
the elevator is moved by an alien purpose, god or monster,
and the rider is a puppet on its steel ropes.
I press a cryptic button, the floor presses against my sleeping feet
in uncontrolled acceleration—I wonder if the elevator will stop
before it lifts through the roof and hangs swaying
on its leafless frame, as it open its doors into wind,
impossible to escape. Breathless, I exert my dreaming will.
The elevator slows, and opens into a safe darkness.
In sleep’s last twilight the wind waits over the porous roof.Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She has studied poetry at the Joiner Institute in UMass, Boston. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in And There Will Be Singing, An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019 as well. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, J-Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Soundings East, and Barrow Street.