Brooke Harries

Jiffy

I keep thinking about the seventeen-dollar poke bowl
at the Seattle airport and how
for months it’s Thursday or one a.m. Then

Simon sent a poem and for a few seconds
the pain toppling over the brim of my life
went away. I felt excited to feel music,

connection between ordeals. It’s almost like always
changing, by staying in present tense, is the way to live,
especially alone in this apartment.

Last night it struck me that it’s scary
becoming independent. Facing solitude power.
Sometimes I think for fleeting seconds about flirting

with someone I hardly know, then think longer
to no action. Nothing seems possible but staying here,
making myself stick

to writing, reading, editing. I run a road and
see trees and my heart slows with my striding. Stir
beans and try to resuscitate days-old cornbread. Jiffy. 

When they landed on the moon, they found Jiffy from
the last astronauts who tried to land there.
We’re made of Jiffy, not stardust. Cooking and running,

writing meager lines, rethinking them. No
one is touching. I am touching nothing but sheets
I was tricked into buying by a website. It takes five

hours sometimes, to calm my heart before sleep.
I watch a show. I scratch my head. Eat cookies. My body
supine under the low and unhealthy ceiling from the 70s.

Better poems will appear when ready,
like the right man, a family. But if they never do,
I am willing for you to take this one as is.

Yesterday my therapist was rude—frustrated,
like she expected logic to move my thoughts.
It couldn’t. I hurt. And paid another fifty dollars. 

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Brooke Harries’ poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, Salamander, The Shore, Sixth Finch and elsewhere. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship and the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry. Currently, she teaches at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana.