Future Shock

by Nate Pritts

1. Maybe we should see other people.

Just ten years from now all this will be the past
& we’ll be so high above everything
in our flying cars & metallic jumpsuits.
We’ll be so hard to reach that no one
will be able to hurt us & there’ll be no disease
so we won’t be able to hurt ourselves.
Doctor, what I’ve been feeling just hangs on.
Give me any stupid reason to stay in bed
& I’ll do it. Don’t tempt me.
You wouldn’t like me when I’m tempted;
I get stuffed so full of desire I’d smash
my whole life just to get at you.

2. When you’ve been with someone

so long it’s hard to even think
there’s anyone else who could
connect with you on the same
emotional level but then…

3. To some people everything’s a game,

a simple matter of angles calculated &
executed. For example: 8-ball, corner pocket.
A friend in Seattle won’t call for months,
maybe a year, & then an apologetic ringing,
mid-morning, surprised to find me at home—
I’ve been bad & you, you deserved it
least of all. It’s amazing the things we get
used to; in Los Angeles they have earthquakes
everyday but you learn to compensate.
You learn to work with what you have.

4. What’s constant? I fall in love

with the weather lady when she predicts rain.
Today there’s a 20 percent chance
but tomorrow it’s double or nothing.

5. It feels like a hundred bowling balls

rolling around under my feet & here I thought
I was on stable ground. Melodrama
is when you act like the stakes are higher
than they really are. God! Maybe
if we all pray for the same thing at the same
time then what we want to happen will happen.
I pray I’m right. I’ve been told to stand in doorways
during but what about afterward.
Afterward is it ok to come in?


Nate Pritts took his BS at SUNY Brockport, his MFA from Warren Wilson College and his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Currently, he teaches at the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, a residential high school for gifted students,& at Northwestern State University. His poems have recently appeared in Rattle, Cimarron Review, Solo, Dogwood and 5am.

Nate Pritts was nominated for Poets Under 30 by the storySouth editors.