by Dante Di Stefano
You’re awake in the kitchen
and I’ve just gotten up in
the bedroom. The children are
sleeping still in their separate
rooms. Soon, we’ll all start our day
together. Our daughter will
scribble fire on looseleaf as
our son crawls across the floor,
which our daughter will say is
lava, but which doesn’t burn
her brother because he is
a fireproof baby-vampire,
she says, and I’m a daddy-
vampire, and you’re a mommy-
witch, and the dog’s a werewolf.
And everything is magic
on this ordinary day
in early August, although we
don’t note it. And toward dark,
I will plant a tree for you.
We’re like everybody else
outside of poems: so much
eddies around us each day,
but here in this poem I
am a stone and you are a
stone and we are enjambed so
imperfectly under the
soil of this maple sapling,
our son laughing, our daughter
crayoning at the table,
the dog dreaming a blood moon,
our hands become hummingbirds,
our hands become stone statues
of hummingbirds, become roots,
Tuesdays, Augusts of their own.
