There Are At Least Three Versions of Every Life
after Christina Davis
In the first version, you buy Christmas decorations and learn, ideally, how to stir the sauce you consider ashing in. You wonder why you are smoking in the first place as Jim Croce sings that’s not the way it feels, because it is exactly, your heart feeling more like plasma than something all bundled up. You hear yourself say “it goes with the territory,” are glad people do not ask you to explain this.
In the second version you are on a boat, you are at the ocean, you are in a hot tub, you are (again) in the shower,
but oh, the third version (it is the third version for which you have been waiting.)
Jamie Buehner began writing poetry in about 2005, earned her MFA at Hamline University in 2011, and published her first book in 2012.