Postcard, with bread and rabbits

To walk through the town that keeps reappearing in 
your dreams, you begin at the point where you are. Green 
gate opening out into the alley— one way leading up 
and away into the town, the other leading down the slope 
to where no one you know sleeps in houses you no longer 
recognize. To walk through the town that keeps materializing 
in dreams, you return to the last version that flickered 
in your mind. A daguerrotype which someone has tinted with 
color— a purply sky, inky lines of pine on distant ridges; 
a woman and child walking hand-in-hand down the hill 
to a low building where the local credit union has decided 
to bake and sell loaves of bread, raise and skin rabbits 
in the back lot. The yeasty smell from ovens. 

Rows of overhead lamps, 
the light milky like flesh 
under peeled-back skin.