While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me

Specks of toothpaste fleck the mirror.

A fan spins dust in the hall.

I find “this is it” too vulgar to accept

So I wait for a new starting point

As though life will begin there and then.

Do you know what I mean?

Not what I’m saying, what I mean.

Is it possible my function is to hold

All the intricate, interstitial pain

And articulate clarity?

Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.

Give me a pair of shoes, I grow fins.

Twice an hour I trick myself into focus:

I look into the glass as I look through it.

When the new beginning comes, what then?

Does life suddenly reset like an Atari?

Does meaning emerge

Assertively and without invitation?

The task is to live well enough with you.

But how? How do you know what you want

If you don’t tell you? If you don’t hear you?

Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan is the author of two poetry collections: Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award.

He earned a BA from Princeton University, an MA from Dartmouth College, and an MFA from New York University. Currently, he is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.