What her child says in her dream hurts her so much
that, in her dream, she runs to another room
where she tries to breathe or, if she can, stop breathing.
She had tried so very hard when they were small
to be there for them, sacrificing all
sorts of things she had not really wanted
to give each child precisely what she’d read
they needed or, authorities wrote, desired.
To hear this then! She wakes and sits up, stunned
at knowing, for the first time in her life,
that in dream and life she’d not been really hurt.