What I Thought
After Gerald Stern
What I thought was a hundred-dollar bill
on the sidewalk turned out to be a green apple
Jolly Rancher I lost when I was eight;
What I first took to be a row of books
in a dusty library turned out to be
a mustache twitching in a debt
collector’s cubicle;
Indeed, the harmless object
I thought was a glass of white wine
on the deck of a cruise ship
turned out to be barbed wire
around a makeshift compound
(inside were hundreds of children);
Truly, what I first took to be a regular
old brown shoelace on a regular old
brown shoe turned out to be a rope
in the shape of a noose;
The flag fluttering in the wind
at first resembled a gavel of justice,
until I peered closer, and realized
it was only a fiction of war;
And what genuinely looked like a backyard
pool noodle turned out to be (I’m not kidding you)
a National Guardsman in green army camo,
blank stare and half-cocked gun
parked outside the 7-11;
I swear, what appeared to be a line of ants
descending upon a ripe peach at a picnic
table was actually a line of mothers in tank tops
and leggings linking arms and shouting
against a long night of tear gas;
What I had been taught was an open road
turned out to be a nearly-empty well,
mostly poisoned, though we were instructed
to say it was fresh and overflowing,
until water too became a myth,
and in my hand, not a lantern
but a spoon.
Nancy Lynée Woo is an MFA candidate at Antioch University. She has been awarded fellowships from PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks. Find her cavorting around Long Beach, California, and online at nancylyneewoo.com.