Karen Rigby

Alternate Lives

The one where I don’t miss the northbound train

but reach the station covered in foxgloves.

How about the life where none of us

grieves, and I never wed

inside the county courthouse

wearing a black rhinestone dress?

The one where I find you in time, so we start again

where our first lives left, and I run my hand up

and down a wooden banister,

the snowbound house

a globe we never grow old in.

The version where fire tornados

never exist, and Greenland’s ice sheets freeze

in crenellated cakes. The life where I get to mouth

I love you, love you. In that alternate dusk

I never almost die the same winter

you dream beside a wolf, speaking

nothing to no one. My scars reknit

the way mesquite knots over

its own architecture. One day every dried petal

I saved reassembles into bloom. One day you’ll tell me

you’ve read my poem, because in that life not even a leaf

breaks in the coming storm. Not even a storm,

but a city called paradise.

Iain Pollock