Alice Duggan

The Crying Dream

Cartons of babies,
cartons lined up on
the warehouse floor.
Babies all crying,
with twisted faces.
What to do.

Each desperate one says
hold me! That is only
the beginning. After that
they will want to be loved.

Are you the one bringing this dream
to me? You’re pretty busy for one
who is dead. I know, I know,

the babies are crying.

Alice Duggan

Poems by Alice Duggan have appeared in Sleetmagazine, Waterstone Review, SAND, Tar River Poetry, Sugar House and other journals; also in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing, from Green Fuse Press and an anthology, Home, from Holy Cow! Press. She’s interested in dailiness, now and in previous generations, in conversations and colloquial language, in the idiosyncratic corners of life.

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