That first night without a nightlight
do you remember muttering
robber robber to the shadows?
In a word: disabused.
I mean, read the room.
Pick the loneliest dancer.
I mean, you might discover
a sweaty IT specialist
recharging your vocal cords.
I mean, you might discover
interstitial things, things
like dandelion stitched
between the sidewalk-cracks.
The sea swaddling the sky.
The undertow of your life
in a different timeline.
This time—your niece on a bench in Eakins Oval,
her melted popsicle, a Rorschach test. 
The air is thick and out of that thickness
she asks if teeth are really
fairy bricks in disguise.
That’s her pourquoi story. It delights you
and it saddens you. It’s umami.
It presupposes the universe.
It nearly tempts you
to start drinking kamikazes
to the gloaming at happy hour
and call everything, all of it, fate.

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