by Susan diRende
Dreamscape// Pandemic Travel via Horizontal Silage
That winter, we’d use the plastic-wrapped hay bales to go wherever we wanted. My son balanced atop the tunnel, I jogged on the clover below—snow-covered or otherwise. We’d start in Wisconsin and zip to Paris or Italy, spinning vague movie ideas of tiny tables on cobblestone roads. Baguettes, biscotti, the daintiest cups of coffee. My son never tired of traveling. He didn’t want to stay in one spot for long. Maybe a millisecond in Milan. A three-second pause in Peru. It was the motion, the change in location he craved, not those buttery croissants gobbled on the other side. Sometimes we’d only go to Michigan, sometimes New Zealand. Hours and time zones passed in moments, and it was still that winter. I was still jogging from one end of the silage to the other, saying “Careful! Not too fast!” or “Where to next?”
Emilie Lindemann is the author of mother-mailbox (Misty Publications, 2016) as well as several chapbooks, including capsule wardrobe for the end of the world (dancing girl press, 2019). She is a writing instructor and poet and lives on a farm in Wisconsin with her husband and son. Emilie enjoys taking walks in the woods near Lake Michigan, baking, and writing in floral notebooks.
Author/artist Susan diRende travels the world with no fixed abode. She has won awards for her writing including the 2017 Special Citation for Excellence by the Philip K Dick Awards. Her artwork has had exhibitions in New Zealand, Belgium, Mexico, and the US. Most recently, she has had writing and artwork published in The Dewdrop, the Pine Hills Review, and The Gaze Journal.