Sarah Browning
Borrowing Happiness from Tomorrow
It’s so dry this year the sycamores
are shedding their enormous leaves,
palms of crackle and nerve littering
the yard mid-August, while exhaust
from futuristic mowers
the city hauls from rec center
to rec center hangs gray over
our neighbor Joan’s roses;
we require the morning – the atmosphere,
we say – to absorb it all
faultlessly: noise, exhaust,
our fecklessness. I woke at 5
this morning. It’s cooler for a change.
We’d thrown the windows wide
in celebration and as I fretted
my bladder and whether to wrench
my suddenly old and heated body
from the bed clearly heard three words:
No. No. No.
Argument? Orgasm?
Or perhaps like me the man
calling No was reading the news,
all we’ve taken from our children
and theirs. A hangover:
Borrowing happiness
from tomorrow, my son at 7
decreed when first I explained
it, clutching my sorry head.
We’re sorry. We’re all so fucking sorry.
Previously published in MER vol. 22
Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. Co-founder and past Executive Director of Split This Rock, the poetry and social justice organization, she currently teaches with Writers in Progress. Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Award and fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, and Mesa Refuge. She holds an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers Camden and lives in Philadelphia.