November 2021
Bio Note: I am a poet and an adjunct professor of English. Among my recent writing publications, I have published poetry using constraints in the Penteract Press anthology Myth & Metamorphosis, visual poetry at Otoliths, and short fiction at Six Sentences. I earned my MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In the free time afforded to a father of three young children, I compose music for piano using cryptographic constraints.
Your First Child
She cries, she shakes her head, throws food now,
drops bottles, toys, pieces of cheese land everywhere,
she smells of poop, vomit over each shoulder,
down every article of clothing it seems. She wants
and wants, refuses hugs, will not tell you how
her day went, pulls off her socks, pulls at the hair
of dogs sniffing too close, she costs more than you can
afford, she scares you to death at every cough,
has cost you already: Free time. Friends. Sleep.
Your in-laws enter your orbit, most days the mail
is full of fliers, diaper coupons, your home décor
is jungle toys and alphabet foam mats, stacking rings,
off-key toy instruments, you manage in the night
to kick everything hard and plastic answering
her cries for bottles that take too long to warm.
Posed, candid, she smiles in a thousand digital photos.
But every smile you catch without your camera
is why you love her.
Egg of Columbus
I imagine first a large wheel of a table, hard cedar, one long crack through the middle,
and him seated there with his knees apart, rough beard under a swashbuckling sort of hat.
With him are map-readers, whip masters, guys you would never mistake as gentlemen.
They should have names that sound awfully like Cuchillo, Gancho and De Guerra.
They scowl. In their thick, brawny fists, the mugs they wield are both dirty and foamy,
like the shores where their galleons are currently anchored and full of green pillagers.
I picture it a good deal less civil than the Hogarth engraving. More knives, certainly.
Even though I know the story, even though I know how to make an egg stand on its end,
there is still some part of me that anticipates our protagonist, in a genteel sort of way,
calmly wiping together his hands that somehow appear delicate, and then with one hand
snapping his fingers like a prestidigitator. That snap becomes the tavern’s only sound
as jaw-dropped faces admire in dumb silence the most perfect glistening eggshell
they have ever seen, spinning like a top, floating several inches above the center table,
a veritable little pulsar no one could ever replicate, no matter how he explains the trick.
©2021 Greg Hill
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