​​My parents didn’t listen to the Beatles
in my life. I don’t know 
which albums go with which songs--
not too late to learn, but will I? 

What’ll I do with my time? 
Each day, the hourish walk, 
the people as heads in their cars. 
Some look at me, some don’t. 

The pawn shop next to the antique
store, the movie set, suggestive
of some other world, they don’t know,
I’ll never be this beautiful again.

It’s hard to believe in a certain
amount of money, or fear, the fear
of the absolute dark that asks, is it 
not too late to eat a peach?
Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.