Hot Pot Magazine

By Andrea Camille D’Souza

I will never have children. I will glorify forgiveness
so we’re always in love. I will glorify delusion
when you tell me that’s ridiculous. I will buy a set of markers,
and glorify the markers. I will buy a set of vases

and keep them around the kitchen with the markers inside,
and when I run through the mail, I will hand you empty envelopes,
and hand you a vase of markers, and ask you to draw the person
that I would become if I set aside my dreams

to help you with yours, and then to draw yourself
if you did that for mine, and then to draw the doors
between where we are now and where we could be,
every day a different shape, a different distance from the horizon.

I will frame every drawing. I will hang them on the walls.
I will catch you sneaking glances and glorify your wince.

On the first of every month, I’ll invent a new recipe
inspired by the drama that is happening at your job,
and every year, on your birthday, we will serve the best concoctions
to our friends and our family, and nobody but us

will notice the paprika retreating in the soup
or the passive aggression of the cake’s blue raspberry
exhausting the chocolate, and nobody but us
will smile at the salad, watch it glorify the wine.

Life will forget, if you never remind it.
People can be who you ask them to be.

I will ask. I will soften. I will tell you to name a person
you have idolized in secret, and I will take a guess
about what that person feels at the end of a day,
and then you will name something that you think we can do

that will make us feel that feeling. Then I will name the person,
and you will guess the feeling, and cycle and cycle

until one day, together, we are building a museum
where people tour replicas of ordinary homes
because someone we admired experienced the satisfaction
of shaping something glorious and unremarkable and like themself.

Visitors will vote for what kind of person
that they think owned each space: the kind who will heal
when they learn they are important, or the kind who will heal
when they learn they are not. You will count the votes,

and I will look for bruises on the side of your arm,
find each piece furniture that shifted from its place,
move it where it belongs, measure the inches.
And on our spot on the wall, I will mark a new notch.

Andrea Camille D’Souza is a graduate of Princeton University where she studied Operations Research and Poetry. Her poems have been published in Tilted House, Olney Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.