I ask not
For your hand
In marriage
I long
For so much
More
Wont you see
These hands
As ours
In life
Forevermore

It’s Valentine’s Day.
Daddy makes coffee in two cups heart-shaped cups.
Mommy is in bed, sleeping in.
Daddy waits for Mom to wake up- she doesn’t
but she’s still breathing.
Daddy sighs and goes to work.
Mommy shakes my sister and me awake
and pulls us into boots and coats and gloves.
We tiptoe over shards of glass on the way out.

Mommy drives too fast.
She makes me watch when the light is green for go
at long intersections because she keeps getting something in her eye.
We get to the airport.
Mommy dashes inside like a guilty person in a movie
but I know she’s innocent because she’s my mom.
I sit and watch planes disappear into bundles of clouds that look like white cotton-candy
and planes land pulling their wheels into their chest with a fast whoosh.

Mommy comes back empty-handed.
One long sigh passes her lips
before she starts the car.
My sister asks where are we going.
Mommy only gets a short sound out but I know she means home.
“Good,” my sister says. “I’m tired.”
“Me too,” Mommy replies.

Julia was careless, and withal
She rather took than got a fall;
The wanton ambler chanc’d to see
Part of her legs’ sincerity:
And ravish’d thus, it came to pass,
The nag (like to the prophet’s ***)
Began to speak, and would have been
A-telling what rare sights he’d seen
And had told all; but did refrain
Because his tongue was tied again.

His fingers was dripping poetic justice and his heart was covered in dictionary pages. I remember how he compared the works of Dickinson to how the stars shine in the night sky. I loved the way his eyes sparkle and his heart becomes frantic whenever he talked about the beauty of literature.

But not once when we were "together" did his eyes twinkled when he talked about me. Not once did he looked at me in fascination like how he looked like when he read The Tale of Two Cities. Not once did the hairs on his neck stood when I showed him the poems I made for him. And not once did he offered a word for me.

Beautiful, fascinating, ethereal.
Those are the words he use to describe literature. Those are also the words he never used to describe me.