It’s not really any of my business that our cats have sex
with one another when we’re not home, but they’ve shed so much
hair on the upholstered chairs that it’s anyone’s guess
what they were doing. And next year you’ll be in New York
and I’ll be in Minnesota, but we can still compare
our favorite brands of soy milk over the phone;
I’ll be just a few hundred miles away, remembering
what it felt like to kiss your knuckles during a lightning storm,
and how every bolt of electricity
didn’t even come close to comparing how you felt beneath me,
opening like one of Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers.
We can still meet up and visit the penguins at the zoo,
feed them bread crumbs from our pockets
and laugh at the zebras galloping inside the fences.
Distance isn’t quite so bad once you get used to it;
it’ll be just like playing that game of hide and seek
all the time when we were children,
except this time it’s not a guarantee
that I’ll be able to find you again.
