What If  

My father would have liked to be the Spanish king,

Mom—Humphrey Bogart. Grandfather would have liked

to be the chef de cuisine on the Russian front,

instead of cooked sawdust and snow bread

beef stroganoff for everybody.

Great-grandmother held the four corners of the house together,

so that her quarrelsome relatives wouldn’t do her in.

When she saw in the newspaper a picture of the last

Hawaiian princess, she dreamt about the gorgeous hat

of the heir to the throne, about the islands

which she would know how to hold together;

the Americans would not have dethroned her.

My great-uncle, before the army of his brain

turned against him and burned down his

towns and villages, wanted to be Gagarin.

He was not happy going into space, even less going home.

Grandmother, who wished she had been born under the sign

of the flower, after her death arranges her family graves in

her cemetery—and what would you like to be,

when you graduate from the school of dreams?