Hello

I fell out of someone’s
debut novel, and now 

I don’t know what to do.
It’s scary out in the world.

I would like to wake up
in that bed again,

a morning in late 
1940s sunlight, just a few 

years after the war,
sharing a cigarette

with the woman
who might go on 

to be my wife. I don’t know, 
something must have gone 

terribly wrong. I think 
maybe the workshop

hated me. I didn’t even argue 
or run out blindly 

into city traffic. It’s just
I was never developed.

I stubbed out my cigarette
and then she dumped me.

Bill Manhire

Bill Manhire‘s last collection of poems, Wow, was published in 2020, and was a Poetry Book Society Selection. An interview subsequently appeared in PN Review. A recent collaboration with Norman Meehan and others, Bifröst, has been released by Rattle.