By Fay Dillof

But maybe you don’t have to be happy,
Kid, to be happy

you’re alive,
and it’s enough to stand on one leg, tilting,

and toss your heart like a stone.
To look at a magnolia tree

and see a magnolia tree. A crow, a crow.
Make something spectacular out of . . .

I hid, as a child,
notes beneath stones for my future self.

Now I am my future self
and could blame my upcoming operation.

Or the text I just wrote about my daughter,
not realizing she was on the thread. Roe,

overturned. Or my closest friends, all of them
away, it seems, in Italy or France

and how they won’t stop WhatsApping me.
But maybe you don’t have to be happy

to know what to do
with an afternoon as green as this.

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Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, FIELD, and Green Mountains Review. Her poems have won the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize and the Dogwood Literary Prize and have been supported by a John Ciardi Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Claudia Emerson Scholarship from Sewanee, and an Anne Bastille Residency. Dillof lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California, where she works as a psychotherapist.