Poem of the Week

i love you from all the places.

there’s still a lot of uncharted territory,

you can go on and on, until your forehead hits

the refrigerator magnets,

brought from various countries: we weren’t together here, or there,

and i sent pictures and texts from here, and i called you from there,

a spectacular landscape, a yellow-toothed otter, a bamboo forest

that just stood and stood, guarding the earth,

then one day it began to grow, and shot way up overhead.

the list of cities we must see

when all this is over has grown so long

that i ask myself at dawn in a foreign country,

in some hotel, in an uncomfortable bed:

will we have enough life left for the whole list?

will we have enough headspace

for all that freakish growth?

will we have enough strength for it all?

"there's one thing you don't have to worry about," you joke,
"if we run out of space for magnets,
we'll buy a bigger refrigerator."

i love you from all the places.

i return to you from everywhere, like a magnet