The long white curtain is still hanging on. The baby still sleeping somewhere in all of that. I don’t mind a thing. I don’t mind at all. See how slow and good it can be? He says and points to my gizzard. The one he insists upon me having. The same one I have given up insisting I don’t. I’m addicted to the pith and gaff of his arguments, how stalwartly he rows them down the narrow passage of our trying not to hurry banter. I curl into the slow lilt of how he doesn’t mind strolling around inside of promises, like Burt showing Mary Poppins another chalk Paris. Look! A riverboat! Lights and parasols. Pretty lovers laughing on the prow.
We’re both still wearing your T-shirt inside the stewpot dreaming we do between ***. Aprons and porches, babies and waterfalls. The kinds of props you bandit from other people’s dreams. Shorthand for lovers, with an hour to prove they exist.