For Ben
If I get to be old, my body a tower of carelessly stacked dishes in polyester slacks that somehow makes it from breakfast to dinner and to breakfast once again without celebrating a milk-glass confetti onto the ground, my hair a wild bouquet of television antennas, my eyes a pair of bashful blue brides hiding behind ivory veils, my skin a well-traveled and sinking hot air balloon
If I begin to stand on the back porch and call in for dinner a cat that was found curled under the porch in a peaceful rest long before my teeth were pulled and replaced with ill-fitting typewriter keys that click and ding and must be slid back into place, I hope that my hermit-crab brain crawls up and into the memory of this thing between us that is love but not need
I will call the mailman by your name and swoon over the gifts you bring me each day
Every grocery list, a love letter scrawled to you until my hands fuse into conch shells I can only press to my ears to feel the hum of all of
the kisses blown from and caught in my palms
and in this way even the leaving will be beautiful
as beautiful as that evening I flew back home alone and untouched but never more sure that I loved you
The city, your city, that I love in the same way that I love you disappearing
a closing mouth full of gold teeth in the heavy-headed sun resting nestled on the clouds like a lover’s chest.