Kristen Holt-Browning

Future Imperfect

We try a new language on for size: unstressed, we delay
all verbs. We pay eight dollars for lavender-foam lattes,

try to remember the meaning of the word harrow. We recall
a tool, the ground dug and overturned, sliced rude, fill the hollow

in our mouths with harder words like lacquer. We secretly long
to shine, while soothing our selves with stereo thunder and too-steady

rain pouring into sleeping ears, the sound silencing the real birds,
drenched, outside the window, singing at rhythms we can’t predict anymore.

We dismiss them as ornament, hollow, feather-headed, then regret
our choice of words. We ask the stone gods of damp hours to lend us

the granular glamour of a dead language we might appropriate, but
they have turned away from us, we’re left tense, murmuring harsh

dialects of deforestation, clauses carried by erosion. Without our hands
on any wheel, we have already changed all we’ve plowed and driven over.

We are an incoherent terminology. We shall speak in the future imperfect
obsessive tense, we will insist that a forest of water is manageable,

that we will remain well-spoken on a drenched and gloomy terrain,
all roots loosened, all rot breaking down structures, linguistic and otherwise,

we will translate our selves until we are ghosts against all past and future
perfect disaster (it had not worked / it will not work)—

sentence: eternity
of tidal nights—

fluent—if we will
have been lucky—

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Kristen Holt-Browning is the author of the novel Ordinary Devotion (Monkfish Book Publishing), the poetry chapbook The Only Animal Awake in the House (Moonstone Press) and the forthcoming poetry collection Watershed (Fernwood Press). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Ninth Letter and other publications. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State with her husband, two sons, two dogs and one cat, where she works as a freelance editor.