I cannot decide if today is today

or some Tuesday

in the May of

1990 — when

the not-yet-

an-engineer

embraced the not-yet-

so-many-things,

laughed through

their fingertips

and the soles of

their feet,

laughed about

one nothing

that burgeoned

into so many others,

enthralled

by each other’s

glorious

and rapturous

will to self-destruct —

the kind of

hubris-less-ness

only the

transparency of youth

can sustain —

and knew of

so many ways to

go back in time:

tree rings, bones,

the rays

of cosmic

stars, scabs, soil,

a hair’s split ends.

This poem was originally published in Gravitas in Sept. 2019.