WELCOME, EVERYONE!

It’s time to take off your shoes and transition
to some of these house slippers. Here’s not
a place for outside. On this table you can put
your keys and at least one petty resentment
you’ve never shaken. Non-petty resentments
you can bring (haha what else would you do?).
Let me show you to the big room. Whoa, right?
The paintings on this side are from your most
naked aspirations. The other side, your most
well-founded fears. And you get to choose where to sit.
Have you ever wondered why you’re so viscerally
disgusted by bananas? Allergic to cherries?
Why your dad’s admirable aversion to shame
also makes it a challenge for him to apologize?
(Apologize for what?), if you’re interested,
is on the drink menu. Your friends are welcome too
but only if they’re not just called friends because
you don’t know what else to call them.
Wait till you see the bedside envelope
with the black hole where you can find out
if your physical ailments are actually emotional
or vice versa. We’re so happy to have you.
You can check the guestbook to see whether
you would’ve been happier as a dolphin or a bear.
There’s also an assortment of older people
in the guest suite who can tell you whether or not
everything will be okay. But you have to cover
the weight of whether or not to believe them.
And the tension between remembering your mother
as she was and not just as she is, yet still clinging
now to her desperately? We ran out of that.
But I’m sure if you wait long enough, I can find some.

Jon Sands is a winner of the National Poetry Series, selected for his second poetry collection, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the facilitator of the Emotional Historians workshop, a series of generative writing classes with well over 1000 registrants to date that you can find out more about on IG at www.jonsands.com/emotional-historians. His work has been featured in The New York Times, published in The Rumpus, The Millions, Cortland Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Foundation, and The Best American Poetry. He is a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly reading series at Cheryl’s Global Soul in Brooklyn, and has received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.