You can drink a bourbon out of a pineapple rind.

I think it’s intended to make you feel

like you are a part of something, connected back

by the long straw in your mouth.

I’m desperate to travel in time

to before we all started treating each other

so poorly, but I know I would be like the character

whose power is she can wind back the clock,

but only for three minutes.

It’s not long enough to prevent anything.

It’s only enough time to tear through the downtown

bawling and then watch it all happen again.

Fifty

Fifty

He said IF YOU KEEP PUNISHING

YOURSELF LIKE THIS YOU’LL BE OLD

BY THE TIME YOU’RE FIFTY

and right there in the instant

of him saying it I became fifty

I was never able to go back

and it was never made clear to me

what might have transpired

in the obliterated years between

had I performed myself inside them

exceedingly quickly or had I

not lived them at all

I felt as though I had memories

a deaccessioned painting

a hovel with keyhole doorway

anecdotes of conglomerates

and their cocktail-napkin origins

was I supposed to be charmed

hardest of all was the recentness

of every egregious outburst

every midnight plummet

the adjacency I couldn’t wish away

I was fifty and my worst

mistakes I’d made just yesterday

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

Other children, when I was a child,

would at times invoke the inner light—

I misunderstood.

I thought it meant God scorches

within us, and God, like a torch,

can go out. That was so long ago.

I’ve since ceased my believing in death—

there’s no such thing.

There’s only a kind of brownout,

the whole of the globe turning

off for a moment, then shuddering

back, the same as it was,

except one person short.

And then before long, an utter new

person is born. Somebody worse.

About the Author

About the Author

Natalie Shapero is the author of two previous collections, Hard Child and No Object, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches at Tufts University.

Also by Natalie Shapero

ALSO BY NATALIE SHAPERO

Hard Child

No Object

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the editors of the publications in which poems from this book first appeared, sometimes in alternate versions: The Adroit Journal, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Arkansas International, The Awl, The Believer, Bennington Review, Brick, Granta, Gulf Coast, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Hong Kong Review, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Memorious, Mississippi Review, Narrative, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry London, Provincetown Arts, Sidereal Magazine, Southeast Review, Subtropics, and Washington Square Review.