Paula Grenside, Poetry & Art Editor
David Ayers, Prose & Flash Editor
Michael Kimball, Contributing Editor
Howard Miller, Contributing Editor
Carol Yocom, Design

There is an arc from Droom to Dream.  We have crossed bridges, travelled and dwelt in all parts of the world to offer new landings, to offer a home our readers could explore. Avatar holds the texture of dreams that go beyond REM, beyond Freud's and Jung's psychoanalytical interpretations.  Our dreams contain vision, beauty, or emotion with enough creative impetus to fall on paper or canvas in original, imaginative forms.  Our Dreams issue holds nightmare and the minutia of our daily lives in that brief flash where reverie joins ink and paper.

Welcome.

Were It Not That I Had Bad Dreams
J.T.

I. Can't Remember Roaming

Ponies that don't dream arrive psychotic. Think:
a rush awake. Only a blink, and back to sleep.
Iteration: Breathe. Pace and pace. Next breath. 
Awash: In out, night. Shudder, gasp and stiffen.
Black, gray, whitewashed light. Fog in motion.
But:
      a coffin, standing on a podium in dry ice. Loud,
aware, alone, with blinders. At home in the crowd
of silence. Each clatter of shifting feet, a trance,
a night terror, a shudder up the mane. A stream points
without memory, the sudden chirps of crickets. 
Look! The mark of a saddle in the cold, cold sweat -
Look! All the day's riders are riding around, and yet,
the pony doesn't see it, oh, the pony doesn't feel it.

II. As Kandinsky Sees It

Atoms decay, Becquerel said, splitting out the blue world
from the green and from the yellow. This rift
split time in two. Our soul is mixed in primaries
that degrade. How can art be right when life's
essence is a sieve? When the musics of our spheres
are the broken notes of night? When our horses
all refuse to journey out too late? How can the colors
of our circles spread such darkened compositions,
and the frozen lights of night leave memories so broken?
A dream is a reminder that what's finished is still open.

III. Bounded In a Nutshell

I'm a little mad at day. I carry my clattering knives
with the rest of them, without superlatives.
It's better to entreat than stray. I'm quiet.
I take pills (like the rest of them) and let
the migraines go away, and what a small cost!
I get tired so the light mocks, but all's not lost,
I don't sleep. That's what the world awaits,
but I see through them, I can feel them. 
                                               They wait and watch
for me to leave an opening. 
If I unstrap my saddle's cinch
they'll all rush in to dope me. 
The compass that light fastens is so small.
I'd give up dreaming in an instant,
dreaming in an instant,
were there nothing else at all.