Sleep Journal

The story that needs to be told
is the one recited in his sleep. 
He wants to carry it into the day
but its words won’t wake with him. 

Now when he speaks, it sounds
like a cracked bell, and the doors
he opens ache on their hinges,
an echo diminishing, the trace 

of a road erased from a map. 
When he asks for directions, 
they always lead to where the rain
drives its nails into the ground.

MATTHEW WOOD

Matthew Wood is a fiction writer from Los Angeles. He is a cum laude graduate of California State University, Long Beach’s creative writing program. Among other places, his work has appeared in Chapter House, carte blanche, Sinking City, Variant Literature, and El Camino College’s Myriad, where he was awarded the Tom Lew Prize for Fiction.