Apnea by Michael Mark
Shorts Editor Adam Nesbit on today’s short:
We trust our dreams — why wouldn’t we? They’re self-contained, after all. Life, on the other hand, is a bit less trustworthy. And how about the foggy space between dreaming and living? This is the space that Michael Mark gives us a look around in his delicious new bite-sized piece, “Apnea.” Try a taste.
Apnea
He snores, she tells him. He doesn’t think so. So he stays half-awake through the night to catch himself not snoring. Nothing but smooth ocean. So he wakes her to listen. But she tells him she can’t hear what he’s saying over his snoring. But I can hear you! To which she says, that’s the way it is when you are snoring and dreaming you are not. They don’t speak the whole next day, waiting for the other to apologize, until they meet in bed like honeymooning goons. Afterwards, he dreams she kills him. He knows she loves him enough not to kill him so it must be a dream where he is snoring because he can't hear his screams.
Michael Mark is the author of Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet which won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Some of his recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, 32 Poems, The Sun. He was named one of The Best New Poets, 2024. Read more on michaeljmark.com and follow him on Twitter @michaelgrow.
