Thomas Mixon’s “What Anticipated Wonders We’d Have Summed”

What Anticipated Wonders We’d Have Summed

by Thomas Mixon

What tallied courtesies, hedged bits of reaffirming push
notifications we will never eat, forever
lodged between incisors of what could have been.
I’ve found warm columns of an august April
we will never live, next to my bed. 

The forgotten god of wobbly nightstands

                                                                       only
recently has left. Their sweat on top of long division
almost makes the perfect kind of sense.
I’ve never liked math. But some subtraction’s
too fantastic not to recommend.
I tell all my friends. I go on for hours
on end. The endings of our conversations
trend toward never adding up. They say
I’m in a reality some months off. They say
we can’t dwell on a spring that never was.
I show them the runny figures

the forgotten god of wobbly nightstands

                                                                       only
left so we could leave the checkboxes unmarked
the next time this inevitably happens.
The next time this inevitably happens
let’s ingest each missed event
into this brand new data set,
let algorithms parse regret,
and give our grinding teeth some rest.

* Writing Prompt: What imagined, real, ridiculous, or necessary deities inhabit (or have abandoned) the objects we touch every day? What parts of our body do we never press to the unpainted chair, to the extra shoelace? Experiment with delayed interactions. Taunt the god of the unstable line break. What’s the shape of improvidence?

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