after Veronica Ryan’s Unruly Objects

It’s dinner time and you’re cooking up something sweet. chicken cutlets or maybe rose quartz.
mango pits in the sink, or maybe great wads of earth. you can’t reach the top shelf, and you
haven’t opened a jar on your own since the day we met. your brain is a million little jars of,
olives and honeys and sweet jams; the names of your mother’s mother’s cats, the names of the
places you want to show me some day. you are saving empty egg cartons on the window sill to
fill with seeds when March stops holding its breath. i am trying hard to learn that good things can
come without strings. your mother calls to tell you she fixed the holes in your favorite sweater.
you watch me get dressed and undressed, wool to thread to wool again. the floor in the hallway
creaks up and down with your footsteps like a heart on manual start, and the words i love you
creep out on the exhale.