We’re already there. The next day waits for me to serve breakfast in a blue dish. We re-arrange the apartment to match my therapist’s yellow den. It’s unintentional, perfect this way. We have a constant supply of cooked grains to shovel into Tupperware and then our mouths. The animal is never without a lap. We’re already inside the future I imagined would never break its yolk on my waiting head. Holy fuck, we’re putting records on the player and bouncing back and forth between two TVs to make sure we never miss a single glittering fist of confetti. The animal has four hands to feed it, gladder and fatter with every day. We might love nothing more than one another, constantly raising our hands to join each other’s team. With pride wear the green pinny, with holes and eternal stank; jog across the field, slip in the slick muddy grass, fall, shake your body laughing, put another hole in the pinny, repeat the next day, forever, etc. 

Sara Vander Zwaag is a poet and holistic health coach living in Oakland, CA with her cat, Timo and her fiancé, Tyler. She is the author of the forthcoming title GOOD RIVER (White Stag Publishing, 2020). Her poems have also appeared in The Offending Adam. She was the recipient of the Lannan Poetry Prize at Saint Mary’s College of California and a scholarship to the New York Summer Writer’s Institute.