Laura Kasischke __________ Time Like a twentieth-century dream of Europe—all horrors, and pastries—some part of me, for all time stands in a short skirt in a hospital cafeteria line, with a tray, while in another glittering tower named for the world’s richest man my mother, who is dying, never dies. (Bird with one wing in Purgatory, flying in circles.) I wake up decades later, having dreamt I was crying. My alarm clock seconds away from its own alarm. I wake up to its silence every morning at the same hour. The daughter of the owner of the laundromat has washed my sheets in tears and the soldiers marching across some flowery field in France bear their own soft pottery in their arms—heart, lung, abdomen. And the orderlies and the nurses and their clattering carts roll on and on. In a tower. In a cloud. In a cafeteria line. See, cold spy for time, who needs you now?