2 Poems by Jeffrey Hermann
What We Know So Far
My wife would never leave the Earth.
She says it’s all we know, the rest
is cold and unimaginable and asks me
to meet her in the driveway
when she comes home late.
They say the universe is probably expanding.
The same stuff just spread out more
is how we describe it to our children.
Our beds are slowly leaving our rooms
they cheer. Our toothbrushes
grow dimmer, inching away with the stars.
Outer space is a boy’s term for the science,
or a poet’s:
A rocket is a pencil for traversing the sky
and a pencil is a rocket to address the page
is a title I considered for this one.
Only astronauts get to float about
up there in the mind of god.
Their thoughts full of particles and waves.
Their notebooks all sentimental detail
about what sex is like
without the pull of the tides.
We’ll wait for an explanation.
We won’t worry
when we can’t see the moon
some nights on drives
along the shore,
summer in the air.
The gentle lights
of the dashboard
revealing our faces’
most human qualities.
Minor Authors
For dinner we order Japanese noodles and eat them with forks.
Who knows how long it takes to learn with chopsticks.
It takes what it takes. Everyone is unique.
Our daughter, for instance, finds it hard to trust a drawbridge.
The lake might as well be an ocean. It’s that big. That cold. It’s summer.
Everyone shares a memory of a ship in the distance.
A yellow sail on a pink sky. A dark wake from a hull of steel.
Everything we say is a perfect couplet. Our bowls of soup have an horizon.
Our spoons are coming home. A warm broth with tender onions.
Jeffrey Hermann's poetry and prose has appeared in Feral, Palette Poetry, Pank Magazine, trampset, The Shore, and other publications. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.