Her nightstand has piles of notebooks
that she has filled with lists:
of presents she might send him
while he’s at Wittenberg,
of who would be invited
to the wedding if it was big
or if it was small, of menus,
of honeymoon destinations,
of baby names, of flowers
she might like in the garden,
of what she would need to take
for a trip to England
or the mountains or Italy,
of what she would need to take
for an elopement
or if she ran away herself
or if her father finally agreed
to let her go to college.
One notebook outfits dorm rooms,
singles, doubles, triples, quads,
another has various changes
she would make to the castle,
and another has possible names
if she ever had a small B&B.
Every night, she writes a new list,
each an attempt to imagine a possible future,
each an attempt to reassure herself she has one.

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. He has published four collections of poetry with Press 53.  His fifth collection, This Miraculous Turning, will be released in September 2014.  More information is available at www.josephrobertmills.com and he blogs regularly at www.josephrobertmills.blogspot.com.