By SM Stubbs

I’m awfully good at it, with years
of experience, plus eons of needing
to disappear from the world, plus
my mother’s dead and my father isn’t
and I’d like to believe for a couple of hours
that one of those isn’t true. If I say,
Jigsaw a hole so you can crawl from your reality
to mine, can you do it? If I say, Reality
is a snare for unhinged minds, will you believe
we’re not all playing by the same set of rules?
Perhaps I’m searching for the trap door
they spring the minute you understand
how things work. Psychologists say children
learn how to negotiate the world by play-acting
adult roles. When I played Store, I learned
how capitalism relies on the bottom line
and slim profit margins with little room
for discounts and when I played House,
I learned how to manipulate my wife
into cooking dinner night after night, how
to avoid chores that don’t involve sparks.
Only now am I starting to understand
the precision with which children mock
their own futures. I’ve examined my traumas
and what that type of pretending meant,
but as long as we’re inventing new selves
I’m going to leave it out, make believe
it never happened. I hope that’s okay. I hope
I can deposit that in the past for now.
This is us pretending. This is us negotiating
the world. When we woke this morning,
the temperature had dropped thirty degrees
and everything was covered in frost.

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SM Stubbs was born & raised in South Florida. Gunpowder Press released his first book, Learning to Drown, in January 2025. He has been on scholarship and a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best American. His work has or will appear in Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, and others. smstubbs.com.