By: Gale Acuff

Miss Hooker is my girlfriend in my dream
and I’m on one knee proposing, my right
because my left is bad but if it took
a little more pain to pop it I would,
that’s how much I love her. And she loves me,
I know because she told me so, she’s my
Sunday School teacher so I trust her and
her red hair and green eyes and freckles, too,
which is what attracted me to her, those

and her good old stories from The Good Book,
which is her way of saying The Bible
and it is pretty good, I’ll read it all
or at least more someday, even if there
aren’t any pictures–I’ll put some in when
I learn to draw and can do God justice
that way. I try in other ways, not to
sin if I can help it, though all folks will,
Miss Hooker says, and she should know. She says

we’re doomed to sin since Adam and Eve but
we can try like Hell not to–heck I mean,
Miss Hooker would never swear. And if we’re
married one day then neither will I but
if we never do I’ll still try damn hard,
that’s how much I love her–love God, I mean,
or both, seeing as how God’s in her and
one day I will be, too, like a spirit,
I think that’s how you make a family,
so we’ll have some babies and raise them and

send them away when the time comes, I mean
they’ll want to go anyway and leave us
alone together until we die, she
first, she’s fifteen years older, 25
to my 10, and then it will be just me
the way it is now, except in my dreams
when we’re together. I was on one
just about to ask her for her Yes and
it was almost like a prayer but then
I had my eyes open and was holding
her hand–if God has one I’ve never held
it. And He never answers my questions,
my prayers anyway. And then I woke
and was alone again. That’s what love is.