In another dream

             We pass an avocado pit between
our mouths in the backseat of a minivan.

             It is winter, the way it’s always winter,
and come midnight we run naked circles

             through the snow. After, on a playground bench,
you lick the makeup from my eyes

             and the black ink runs down your chin as exquisite
tar that you spit onto my pink and waiting tongue.

             You ask me, How many dreams has it been?
But I can’t hear you over the taste

             of my own teeth falling out and sprouting vines.
This part is real—or at least it could be:

             At a McDonald’s drive-thru, a man sells us
seashells and calls me your beautiful wife.

Elise Thi Tran

Elise Thi Tran (she/her) is a Vietnamese-Filipina-American writer based in Chicago. She is the 2022 First Pages Prize winner, a Chicago Literary Club Collyer Fellow, and a fiction judge for NYC Midnight. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Blackbird, diode, the minnesota review, Salt Hill, Shō, and elsewhere. Find Elise on Instagram @elise.tran