Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in the Mystery of the Rest of Your Life by Christopher Citro

That thing that happens sometimes where 

the boardwalk stretches into the forest, 

wetlands reflecting sunlight from below, 

and you feel like you’re on tour through 

a more interesting life than your own. 

I’m already gathering what I plan to miss 

on the operating table. And your eyes 

looking up at me by the bedside light. 

It’s going to be almost too hot for Saturday’s 

cocktail party but we’re going ahead anyway. 

We’ll leave a hose in the lawn in case 

anyone wants to spray their toes and 

scream like they’re four when you think 

you might die and a second later you 

want more. You’re brother wants more. 

Smack your brother. Get in trouble and 

now it’s time to go to bed. There’s more 

darkness in the yard. I’m not done. 

We kept the shades drawn back in 

the bedrooms. A sheet hanging in the hall 

not to waste the air-conditioning, a separate 

world back there, where you lie sideways 

on top of the blankets, propped up 

on your elbows with a paperback. 

The window unit humming in your 

parents’ bedroom. You turn a page. 

Something happens to your brain and 

the rest of your life you want it again. 

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry, a 2019 fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, Columbia Journal‘s poetry award, and a creative nonfiction award from The Florida Review. His poetry appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, West Branch, and elsewhere. He lives in Syracuse, New York. 

13 December 2021