Great Expectations: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017)

Charlie thought he would become a professional soccer player,
but he wound up being a cancer patient instead.

Elizabeth thought she would be an important abstract painter,
but she wound up becoming a spokesperson for the
Proud Parents of Gay Children Coalition.

You don’t know how things will turn out.
You don’t even notice how they have turned out
after they have turned out that way.

If a stranger gave you a Chinese fortune cookie one afternoon,
and you broke open that delicate little pastry shell
and extracted the slip of paper and it said,

“You will be an unusually young widow
living in an apartment in Sarasota, Florida,
lonely but too proud to get a cat,”
you would toss it away without a second thought.

I thought I would be a wealthy, functionally-alcoholic lawyer,
but I ended up being a poor sober person

working in a copy shop downtown,
trying to do a good job with the hole puncher
and the binding machine.

One day my college professor came into the store
with a chapter from her manuscript on Faulkner in her hand.

“You were so talented!” she said.

—Tony Hoagland, “Great Expectations,” Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017)