Tomorrow

I will drive all day.
Bursitis sounds like a thing 
that only existed in the 1950s. 

The family encapsulated in red metal.
 
We have traveled that way fifteen years 
into the future. The capsule has grown worthless. 
Mostly the same roads, close to home. 

Our bodies become larger, then not.

In the future they may become smaller, then not. 
I imagine an arc because I can. 
The future of the past was always clean and white. 

They imagined a future because they could.

We will sit still as our bodies move through space, 
small proof of the future, encapsulated. 
A pill growing harder to taste.

No one told me about the grief of your own child’s awakening. 

Now nobody has to. I am the object in my own mirror, 
shrinking into a future not mine. A capsule 
growing obsolete by design. But not yet.

Tomorrow I will drive all day, back to New York.

Then mostly the same roads, close to home, 
then not. How fierce the quickening of the body. 
How boring I have become.

The partial world is awakening through pain.

There is a planet that might save us, if we can get there. 
We need a better vehicle. We imagine the future 
because we must. There will be no colony, no escape.

MICHAEL QUATTRONE

Michael Quattrone is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006). Recent poems appear in Poets Reading the News, Streetlight, and The Night Heron Barks. A sonnet is included in Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present. Michael co-curated the KGB Poetry series from 2007 to 2011. He lives in Tarrytown, New York.