Gary Snyder asked me if I wanted tea.
No, I said. The caffeine will jolt me.
You don’t want to change? he asked.
No, no false escapes, I said.
What do you fear? he said, buttering his bun with a camp knife at a fancy café.
Religion, I said, missing the exit to his airport through a sheet of tears.
Ten years later, he’s still splitting the same log
and I’m here with a charlie horse,
still not curious about tequila or even weed.
The ghost of God hovers over the frog pond,
slips from the flesh of a peach.
A three-time winner of Fountain Square’s Masterpiece in a Day poetry contest, Anne Laker received a Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship in 2016 for her Instagram exhibition project, @10000whens, featuring 30 years of her digitized diary entries. A recent poem, “Tibbs Drive-In,” was featured in The Indianapolis Anthology (2021, Belt Publishing).