Wednesday, July 24, 2024: Jeanie Greenfelder's "Time Travel" (and accompanying photo)

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                                                                              © 2024 Jeanie Greenfelder
 

Jeanie Greenfelder’s poems have been published at American Life in Poetry, Writer’s Almanac,

and as a Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day; in anthologies and in journals: Miramar, Thema,

Askew, Persimmon Tree, and others. She served as the San Luis Obispo County poet laureate,

2017,18. Jeanie’s books are Biting the Apple, Marriage and Other Leaps of Faith, and I Got

What I Came For. Learn more at jeaniegreensfelder.com


Time Travel


My ten-year-old self climbs

into her time machine,

aims for age twenty-four,

and over-shoots the mark.

In the ballpark still, but

landing with me, age eighty,

she pouts, wants to play

Monopoly, and eat Twinkies.

She hates maintenance,

floss, water pick, and brush,

wonders why she aches

and can’t sleep. Where are

the parties and dances

she’d imagined?

Her prince turns out

to be an ancient king.

She rails against kale

and cauliflower, longs for

grilled cheese, pot roast

and potatoes, convinces me

to buy Coke and Cheetos, bake

chocolate chip cookies.

I try to reform her, yet

yield—a bit too happily.

Though hooked on my iPhone,

she wants the time machine

to send her home to Mom,

Dad, and mean big sister.

She stares in disbelief, a disbelief

I share when I tell her

she’s lived eighty years, that

life is the time machine.


© 2024 Jeanie Greenfelder

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