from new ohio review
My love lives in a little tiny box
Made of pixels and engineering. When I write him
He writes me back and when he writes me
Back, I write him. Even though we exist
Me/him, here/there: one day our band
Of consciousness will grow outward,
When science puts chips in brains So all mysteries can be known—
Delusions, proclivities, sentences.
For now imagination, a gangly vine,
Grabs for a life. He has been so busy Writing a narrative where he has no wife That she has disappeared. So much first-person Construct and banter. He has A vixen schoolteacher held down On the bed of his mind. And when he Writes me he makes me And when I make him I write him.
We are invented, in part,
By the wanting and not having Of others. Soon someone else Will pick him out of his little box And begin again, wait for him
In the rain in front of the coffee shop Where inside the donuts harden like He can’t, and the red counter chair swirls empty As if trying to conjure something so close.
But so close is almost, and almost is really Far, still. She tries to pick him out of the crowd,
Ever hopeful, though night comes on like emergency. And he is two places at once, virtual and real.
My love lives in a little box. Someone
Is making him
Into something else now.
Nominated by New Ohio Review