In an Alternate Universe,
Mrs. Williams Finds a Slightly Different Note
Ate all the plums I bet you bought for morning.
They kept me in the john all night. Fair warning.
Happy Birthday
Five hundred eighty million miles!
The fact’s so big, we can’t absorb it.
Regardless, here’s a round of smiles
to mark your latest solar orbit.
Robert West‘s poems have appeared in Light, Still: The Journal, Alabama Literary Review, Poetry, and other venues. With Jonathan Greene he is co-editor of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013); he is also the editor of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, forthcoming from W. W. Norton. He teaches at Mississippi State University.