The Only Version by Michael Olenick

A tram speeding down a blurred narrow street — *Tram* by Filip Trefil. CC license.

The only version of us that remains

are the nightly replicas

that appear randomly

as my sole consolation prize.

Last night we visited a country

that was a cross

between Costa Rica and Switzerland.

After a walk through the

banana forests of Zurich,

we could not remember

where the car was parked,

and as we searched,

the streets got narrower

and narrower

and through a sunlit slash

at the end of the road we saw

our children on a passing tram.

They were somehow older than us,

and were trying to brush Lindt

off a white-faced capuchin.

Michael Olenick lives in Brooklyn with his daughter, son, and wife’s ashes. A lapsed English major, he stopped writing after college and started again following his wife’s death . . . it kind of helped, maybe a little, who knows. His work has recently appeared in Euphony Journal, Offcourse Literary Journal, and r.kv.r.y Quarterly Literary Journal.