She Gets Drunk and Talks Too Much at Her 20th Reunion

Used to be I was locked in the future. And the future

was no blank canvas, was no white page, but

was crammed with graveyards and rivers and red-eyes.

All black and green and gold, all sailing-off-the-edge,

all how-do-you-know-which-mushrooms-are-poison?

Used to be everyone said baby in my fantasies,

but mainly my fantasies were silent, occasional voices

flapping past the moving windows, aural hitchhikers.

Used to be I’d pick the voices up for a while, then

drop them in the next town. If they got rough, the gun

came out. Used to be I was going to ride horses and sail

schooners. I was always going to have twelve babies,

and they were all going to live. Sometimes the future

was the prairie in 1870. I wore hay in my hair

and howled till the wind matched my pitch. Sometimes

it was Fenwick Island in the sixties, and I saved

men and children from the toothy waves. Sometimes

I crawled through movie screens and snatched plastic

apples right from the almost-bite of starlets. The starlets

hated me. Because I could climb out of the screen again.

They wanted to leave. Oh, baby, I told the girls, everybody

wants to leave. It’s when you stop wanting it you’re in trouble.