Poem of the Week | February 23, 2026

Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, was published by River River Books in February 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’s Snowbound Chapbook Prize and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She coauthored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family. 

“The dream says I am here to tell you” by Zoë Ryder White is our Poem of the Week.

The dream says I am here to tell you

The dream says I am here to tell you that bodies  
are not what you think. Swelled and ebbed nodes 
pocketed in your armpits, palmed at the groin:  
lymph is nothing to be ashamed of, the dream says. 
Tells how you bled so late you wondered if you were real, 
how you weren’t real, and you were, and you aren’t  
and you are, how anything that makes you  
gasp like that is good for you, how the scars collect,  
how you’ll flash them to your friends as their scars  
collect, how every call feels free now  
so you can go ahead and talk all night.  
The dream says the bunions are okay, just accept them.  
It doesn’t know why you want to press yourself  
into thickets of brambles all the time  
but it supports this behavior—mutters something about  
becoming one with, something about privacy.  
The dream says to buckle up because what’s coming  
is going to hurt. It calls you sugar  
and ruffles your hair, lays a thumb across your nipple.  
The dream has no body, suggests you use  
your own thumb. The dream is all body,  
keeps you company when you can’t sleep.  
Alongside the dream you affix a flower name  
to each letter of the alphabet. Why not the body  
of an aster, a bluebonnet, a coneflower. A coneflower  
suits you fine, with its bold and upright center.  
You like to tell the blood technician how good they are  
at finding the vein. One quick pinch and you’re   
both in the river; you’re swimming. 

Author’s Note

This poem is the first in an evolving series of “dream says” poems I started when I was in the midst of some mysterious health issues. The foggy brain that was part of that time made everything feel a little tilted, a little dreamy. I also wasn’t—am not, for now—able to run, an activity that generally makes me feel put together, settles the anxious mind. Somehow having the self jostled off-kilter in these ways, slightly unhoused, invited a different perspective. I like the idea of the dream bossing the body around—there’s something comforting in the dream knowing what the conscious mind can’t articulate, or doesn’t want to know. The dream accepting all of it: panic about aging, shifting mobility and relationship with the body, inevitable loss. The tenderness of truth-telling. I didn’t expect to keep writing these poems after this first one, but I kept wanting to hear what the dream would say, so I’ve continued on.