John Gallaher

The New Happy vs the Old Happy

Around a table, there’s a subtle conversation going on,
as they can’t find consciousness, so the new idea is maybe
there isn’t one. The self follows. There’s waking and sleeping,
though, we admit. Look how the dog sleeps,
dreaming it’s a bat. When the yard fills up with the graves
of dead pets, it’s time to start over. Music disappears.
Paintings won’t last. At some point, your lover will say, “Excuse
me, I left something in the other room,” and not come back.
Your house is inching away. It’s planning its retirement
as a bonfire in early spring. People steal your clothes.
So I don’t ride my horses through graveyards.
And I wake early like a good Neanderthal.
“Who’s the one talking here?” the painting asks.
Being shocked is also part of the expected process. “Yes. Go on.”

That’s what the process says. It’s another relationship
that goes straight to streaming platforms. Maybe
they just caught us on a bad day? The very-bad-case scenario
for the climate was a 2 degree warming, and now
that’s the best case scenario. Hope is relative. There is
much agreement on this. This is how we know
we must be wrong. There’s a subtle conversation going on
inside my head. It’s like we’re all standing at the edge
of a field, pointing at it, and saying “field.”
At some point our fingers start to move.
No. It might be the field moving. What do you mean
by “field?” The 20th century wrote about
the imagination and the 21st writes about fungi.
Everyone I know is sick, but who really knows anyone?

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John Gallaher's current book of poetry is My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books 2024). Recent or forthcoming poems appear in APR, Ploughshares, Heavy Feather Review and others. He lives in northwest Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.