Richard Schnap’s poem Evil Inclination appeared here in January 2014.

Happily Ever After
By Richard Schnap

In this world there are things
We are destined to throw away
Nursery rhymes from lost childhoods
Yellowed letters by summer lovers
All of them pages from a biography
Of someone we knew once upon a time
Someone whose story we barely remember

But then there are the things
We are doomed to hold on to
Notarized documents that spell out time
Official blueprints for custom-made homes
Instruction manuals on how to dream
And if we sometimes wake in the night
To briefly wonder if something’s missing
It’s just a fable we used to know by heart