Invent a time machine and
go back to visit your parents in
the bloom of love, know them,
congratulate them and bring
flowers
Discover the antidote to irony and
then dance with them each in turn,
your mother and father, learn that
smell as yours, that perfect rhyming
heartbeat
Fix English to break cause and
effect, fashion sentences in which
subject and predicate are the
same and nothing is anybody’s
fault
Find the cure for subjectivity and
give it away to yourself on
the streets, bring it back home,
realize there is no home, only
habit
Go back in time again and
step on however many
butterflies until the Grand Canyon
is in Africa, the sky one sprawling
constellation
Invent a tree that grows in
reverse, plant it on the graves
of your mother and father, no
one should be remembered
forever
—Published 5th of May 2020
About Dan Wiencek
Dan Wiencek is a poet, critic and humorist who lives in Portland, Oregon. When not making poems, he writes for a luxury travel company and has walked in the same shoes on the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Serengeti Plains and the Abbey Road crosswalk. Someday he will write a poem about those shoes. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hypertrophic Literary, New Ohio Review, Timberline Review and other publications. He is currently working on his first collection of poems.