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.