Hypothetical
by Christine Fellows & John K. Samson

Say you wake up one morning without a language.
Taken away. Stolen by a monster from a childhood
fever for some small slight. You didn’t eat your peas.
You find a pen, begin to draw a day of watching
shadows wander towards the door, of smelling the garbage
and touching the furniture, pressing your face to the radiator, walking
with eyes open, eyes closed, living without naming. Unnamed.

Say you wake up one morning without time.
That stoner’s lament, “Dude, it’s just a construct”
You didn’t anticipate that there would be nothing
to say. No “Busy,” and a sympathetic sigh to reply
to the “How are you’s that line everyday with possibility.
Crowds of helpless mutes stand beside their wrecked
cars at intersections, traffic lights pulse black.

Say you wake up one morning without a body.
You miss your hands like a dead friend.
You play their favourite songs, mourn all their potential,
what they held. Make a Missing poster for your heart
with a description and a photo and your phone number.
Find your ribcage full of topsoil in a garden down the street.
Transplanted yellow flowers peeking out.

Say you wake up one morning without the world.
The world leaves you for another, never returns your calls,
passes you on the street like a stranger. All you can
do is eat potato chips, cry, drink warm vodka from
a jam jar, and watch t.v. The National Geographic specials are
especially cruel. Secrets of the Amazon. Plains of the Serengeti.
And tearing up topographical maps doesn’t make you feel better.

Say you wake up one morning, or be honest,
afternoon, without your constant fear for what you have.
The season is a verb, and a window is open.
The telephone rings to the traffic and birds. The clock
is broken, blinking, you stretch beneath a single white sheet,
and the world looks like it’s about to say something,
but then just shrugs.

With That Moon Language
by Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?

Khyron Patrick, last month

My beautiful boy, eldest son and heir to the throne, my warrior with a poet’s heart, long and tall and newly fifteen (I want to hyperventilate just typing that); I plan to write a letter documenting the past (crazy, crazy) year of his life, punctuated by goofy pictures of fleeting moments captured on pixel, but the picture discs are all packed up and I am currently crazy with the move. I can’t even get a super current photograph this morning, because the birthday boy himself is still asleep just now and by the time he gets up there will be doings; friends and cake and video games (his wish for this birthday, two big screen TVs in the living room hooked up to two Xbox 360s) and presents and I’ll find myself back out in the garage and out of the way, pricing items for tomorrow’s garage sale.

Khyron Patrick, 6th birthday party

So the sentimental outpourings of my heart when I think of this nearly-man who is my son will have to wait a bit. But I do, at least, have a poem to share. It’s going to make me cry, too, because that’s just how I am about these things.

Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?
by Robert Hershon

Don’t fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn’t know
is that when we’re walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand

Our relationship, nearly 17, formed as it was on a hot summer’s day in spite of our shyness and Chad and Travis always seeming to be about, is old enough now to give blood and to see R-rated movies without permission. Our marriage, 15 years old tomorrow, is moody and deep voiced and can test for a learner’s permit.

I looked it up, and we’re supposed to buy each other watches, I guess. Or possibly Austria. But probably some lame crystal tchotchke that will collect dust and won’t match the Star Wars toys and skull decor in the living room.

Back in 1995, when we made our vows in front of a judge who couldn’t keep our names straight, I don’t think there was one person in the entire world who really expected us to make it. Not even me, maybe, though it was nothing personal and I was certainly game to try. I was all-in. And in 15/17 years together, the times when I’ve honestly thought that I regretted saying “I do” to you wouldn’t even add up to an hour. Probably not even 5 minutes, actually. And anyway, those were only times when I was being really stupid.

Happy Anniversary to my husband. (A day early.) Thank you for being the one who always shows up, even when no one else does. I would never have made it this far without you, ever holding my hand.

Alive Together
by Lisel Mueller

Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pop
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master’s bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrong-headed angel,
or Mary’s friend. I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who–but for endless ifs–
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

Washing the Elephant
by Barbara Ras

Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to do it
with soap and water, a ladder, hands,
in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas
of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon’s light fuelling
the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize
your parents in Heaven,” instead of
“Being one with God will make your mother and father
pointless.” That was back when I was young enough
to love them absolutely though still fear for their place
in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full
of something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,
to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies
about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them
as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins
to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,
Land of Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.
Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading
through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants
made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel
and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden.
So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking
after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined
for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken
pathos.

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest—
the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things
like popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no place
for the ones who have etched themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face that’s harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of an elephant,
and it’s always the heart that wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.