June 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 3

The row of dream trees leads to the old decayed Queens asylum

on the border of here and long island nowhere--

now closed for years, decrepit with rats and rot

where you once stood in line for your little paper cup of pills

in the suicide ward of inscrutable screams and screaming silences.

It’s raining grayness in this memory that is maybe a dream.

You remember to try to forget, but it’s not happening--

the grayness persists as you seem to wake

and walk past the anguished trees raining baffled madness

under the locked drugged stupored sky

to the once-beautiful white empty asylum (“mental hospital”)

still dreaming of its patient doctors and doctored patients

vacant-eyed, hardly existing like you were and still are in this tranced landscape

mind-clawed, tainted with dread, confined to narrow-bedded insanity and sleepless rain.