Have A Blessed Day

You have a blessed day too,
I said, and floated out of there
with my coffee and corn muffin,
feeling blessed, beatific, positive-
ly numinous. But now

she says it every time I go in there—
no variation, no shift, no turn.
She just hands me my change
and tells me to have a blessed day—
always bles-səd, never blest, never
a grateful day, an exquisite day,
an applesome day. A failure

of the imagination is what it is.
And it has begun to bother me.
So much so that I have stopped
going there. I miss their divine

muffins. Their heavenly coffee.
But those blessings had a facile, unctuous,
churchy aftertaste. I’d almost rather
have a nice day. Or even a bad one.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear and disappear simultaneously (ta-da!). His new collection is Perfect Disappearances (2025).