Matthew Guenette

I was scrambling eggs for the kids

but I wanted something more, something epic like to take

the moon in my hands. What other powers do I have?

The kids, captive at home for at least

the next month, how to protect them when even the jungle

gyms are canceled and every cough inspires a nightmare.

What else should we do, send them out in hazmat suits

with their safety scissors? Vote? Haven’t we tried

all that? There’s a feeling I want to get us back to,

like when I was 13 and it hardly mattered

if Gorbachev and Reagan waived their intercontinental

pricks at each other, it was all the same

and nothing a game of H-O-R-S-E or Purple Rain

couldn’t fix. I had one job, I plated the eggs

and thought of us climbing back into the trees

to hurl water balloons at the suckers who think

they know better. That’s when I knew better, when I knew

I had another job. I hiked up my boxers like a thonged

superhero. The kids in the next room waiting at

the table: Are the eggs almost done? You have no idea,

I said. Hold tight! Then I tied on my little cape

of sunlight and danced their way.

Matthew Guenette is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Vasectomania (2017), American Busboy, chosen by Mary Biddinger as an Editor's Choice for the University of Akron Press and published in 2011, and Sudden Anthem, which was awarded Dream Horse Press's American Poetry Journal Book Prize and published in 2008. Sudden Anthem was also named an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry in 2009 by the Wisconsin Library Association. He has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and a fellow for the Hessen-Wisconsin Literary Exchange. He works at Madison College, and lives on the east side with his wife and two kids, who make sleep impossible…