I think of you in a yellow floral summer dress
Wearing a woven cow girl hat
A gleaming white smile, brown dimples
And a Miller Light can in a blue foam koozie
In your right hand
And my memory in your left
Scales have tipped
And I’ve pulled the thread
Knowing all along it will end up
A pile of hopeless yarn in the corner
Of the bedroom I designed for us
Over and over in my sloshy imagination.
Unnecessary complications
On such a simple planet
We live in the same country
Exactly 1,841 miles squeezed between us
From my floor to your bed
From my heart to your smile
From the crushed chalk of my drawings
To the yellow cupcake mix
In a cardboard box
In your cabinet.
Militaries have marched right through tapestries
Like football players taking the field
Like medical scissors cutting through gauze
Like two lovers tearing through
The skin of spiky words scribed
On a black board.
It’s the vocabulary of the vicious
And the grammar of the heinous
They are to blame for the tectonic plates
Which have smashed against each other
Forming ice capped mountains
No elephant, man, or empire can cross.
It makes me wish
We had just built one home
So that when the earthquake struck
We either slid into the ocean
Or were swallowed by the gaping earth.
I don’t care which
As long as we are together.
