Where We Are

Okla Elliott

 

 We didn’t meet at a dancehall                                                                                                                               called Nostalgia, though your dress                                                                                                                   suggests we could have.

 We have never ridden horses
 carrying torches in the night,
 but, in a different century, we might have.

 Here, everything is technology.
 Here, we divide ones by zero.
 Here, the word picket-fence is only used ironically.

 Imagine the child we won’t have
 floating on a deflatable plastic raft, safe
 for now, bobbing up and down in a sine wave                                                                                                       out to sea. This is where we are.

Okla Elliott is an assistant professor at Misericordia University. His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His books include From the Crooked Timber (short fiction), The Cartographer’s Ink (poetry), and The Doors You Mark Are Your Own (a novel).