Today's poem is by Hannah Craig

It Would Only Be a Picture Book
       

Anymore, our fingers cannot say
this is just math.

I say put on your shoes. One. Two.
I say we're running over the edge

of time. We will hit traffic now; you spent
too long putting back your hair.

We have to go. And be divided by.
At the stoplight, our dreams exit

from the lip of a warmed planet.
Exhaust & bone, we keep oiling

the working parts of this
believing machine.

Still, we are not more here than there.
More then. More of. Do I hold

you as a lover or am I held
as a garage man cradles a carburetor,

as a grandmother rocks the neck of a hen,
as a piranha holds her meal—glittering, literal.

I say now we're really late. I say get a sweater.
But our clothes were spoiled for us

as we slept, entered by stale air,
by the dank death which creeps from our mouths.

I have never been on-time for luck. For love.
One. Two. We are exiting the ramp of forever.

Do I know you? Or do you know me
as a landmark—that woman at night, in

the shadowy reach of the room, lying there.
You drove past her. You turned left.

We are not well in any sense. But look,
get the kids a snack or there'll be hell to pay.

We mark the time. We mark it well.
It was made to make us nothing,

after we thought we were so
much something. It's lost how many bodies

against the cathedral of one another have
spent their wishes, holy father,

and it's lost the way land divided
in exchange

for the multiplication of words.
I have stopped having my say. Someone else

can have the say.

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Copyright © 2023 Hannah Craig All rights reserved
from The Greensboro Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission