Peter Milne Greiner
​

Impact Crater

What if I take all the ages
What if I take all the shapes
What if I love a gulf
What if I kick up dust
What if I’m dust
What if I’m dinosaurs
What if I’m the passage of time, too slow
What if I’m starting to feel like a fourth wall here
What if I’m love and I don’t exist
What if I’m the conventions according to which you bury me when I die
What if I’m a straight line that can’t exist in nature
What if I’m nature
What if I’m a little circle that could
What if I’m a big circle
What if I’m deep and or shallow
What if I’m secrets buried just beneath the surface
What if I’m visible from space for the next four point one billion years
What if I’m visible from land for longer
What if I’m lights in the sky and noises in the earth
What if I’m the rainforest that obscures Maya
What if I’m bigger than Switzerland in Nevada
What if I’m the desolation and grandeur of very remote places
What if I’m teepee 
What if I’m wigwam
What if I’m anything but considered so roughly only in some circles
What if I’m just getting started
What if what I am is yet to come
What if I become thousands of different kinds of marine life over night
What if I go extinct almost completely but not quite several times
What if I’m everything dying forever
What if I’m what things mean 
What if I’m a celestial cycle sprawled inscrutably across the vastness
What if I’m every whale gene
What if I’m every volcano
What if I’m what it’s possible to live with and through
What if I’m ash in the sky, ash on the stairs, ash in the attic, ash under the bed
What if I’m water and I come up through a geyser 
What if I’m permafrost, if I’m filled with dead mammoths, if I’m all the dead mammoths, 
if I’m extinct but intact
What if I’m cloned and I roam again
What if I’m an ancient dark forgotten evil
What if what is inside me could kill me dead
What if I’m the paths diverging
What if I’m the floodplain, the riparian buffer zone, the accropodes, the spillways
What if I’m what the blue bird augured and where the red fern went
What if I’m the screeds, the screeds, the email, the email, the broken tablet, the 
mouldering heaths of papyri 
What if I’m the dead ends, the false starts, the scourges
What if I’m every unknown thing
What if I’m the stone that the sword’s in or the sword that the stone’s in
What if I’m the militia, the mixed inscriptions, the long labyrinth, the short runway, the 
hollow earth, the feast of plenty, the larch wand, the war machine, the decay rate of rage, 
the day rate of the page boy
What if I’m a mistake that’s getting bigger and bigger every second but never made
What if I’m the primordial ocean but I screw it up somehow
What if I’m lightning crashing
What if I’m on the beach and live at the Acropolis
What if I’m the secrets of stone henge revealed
What if I’m impossible backwards movement across time
What if I’m Robin Hood’s barn, Captain Kirk’s dick, ABBA’s Gold, Cartman’s mom
What if I’m the snake charmed, the barrel ridden, the flint knapped, the love supreme, the 
continent lost, the proof burdened, the eye in the apple, the shock in the shell, the time in 
the capsule
What if I’m before Christ, before breakfast, after Babel, after dinner, after Buffy, before 
life, after the goldrush, during sex
What if under the sea I’m one league of many
What if I’m the castle, the bathtub, the anthill, the copper cylinder, the customs house, the 
naturalist’s notebook, Victor Frankenstein’s lab, the monster, the bride, the son, the 
dawn, the day, the diary
What if I’m no one watching
What if I’m nothing else out there
What if I’m the colors of the wind and the b-sides of innocence
What if I’m Hobbes
What if I’m Artex
What if I’m Toto
What if I’m Cujo
What if I’m young everyone and late everything
What if I am what is known as statistics
What if I’m endemic to this planet
What if when I emerge I emerge as an esoteric flu like slow loris flu, or as an elusive 
property of matter or time or light, or a fjord, or a dis, or Dis, or El Dorado, or Atlantis 
millennia ago or Atlantis right now or Plato’s Cave or The Clan of the Cave Bear
What if when I emerge I’m the temperature at which books are forgettable
What if when I emerge I emerge as the exact cosmic ray that mutates the gene that makes 
it so some people in the future are extra-resistant to certain diseases in zero-gravity 
environments 
What if I’m the great silence, the whole earth, dry land, open water
What if I’m all the ice and I recede and recede and I recede until I’m just
an iceberg, an ice cube 
What if I’m an ice cube 
What I’m gone forever
What if I’m return

---

PETER MILNE GREINER is the author of Executive Producer Chris Carter (The Operating System 2014). His poetry and science fiction has appeared in Fence, Motherboard, SciArt in America, Dark Mountain, Forklift,Ohio, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and works at a hotel. ​