David P. Miller
Who Watches Over Me
The Angel of Good Enough Most Of The Time.
The Angel of This Will Do For Now.
Yes, they wedged the shower stall
into the kitchen. They’ll inform you that plumbing
is plumbing. They shoulder-tap me
when two of my three pairs of jeans are torn,
so I can buy a fourth before the third rips too,
not fashionably. Nor am I ripped
in any sense, but my body coheres
normal-ish as expected. Until further notice.
The Angel of Eventual Reminders keeps his own
list of tasks not more than a month out of date.
He’s good at not rescheduling my appointments
after they’ve happened. He’s okay, if you ask,
though the unasked Angels of Your Best Possible Self
furrow their brows. Only okay? Tut tut!
They’re a teense bit appalled. What’s the issue,
my own angels and I want to know?
I may not own a sofa, but I have enough chairs.
My angels are very pleased with themselves
when they think about how my wife and I met.
Some day I’ll get around to telling them
they weren’t on that case at all. That was
the Angel of Luminous Stellar Explosion,
a/k/a the Angel of Primordial Singularity,
who jumped the wormhole, birthed the extra-
vaganza, vanished while the other celestials
were scratching their heads, searching
my fridge for the substitute margarine.
David P. Miller
David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Denver Quarterly, Blue as an Orange, subTerrain, Jerry Jazz Musician, Hawaii Pacific Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Constellations, Lily Poetry Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other publications. His poem “Add One Father to Earth” was awarded an Honorable Mention by Robert Pinsky for the New England Poetry Club’s 2019 Samuel Washington Allen Prize competition. He lives with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.