How You Could Be Loved (Again)

                        Megan Caldwell

It’s been such a long time since our eyes last met and even longer since our lips last embraced. Please, come inside. I’ll take your coat and start a pot of tea. I still have the packets you left me–green tea with pomegranate. We can start with all the stories we lost hearing each other tell and work our way forward. I’ll mimic morning’s rise and begin at your toes, kiss my way upward past those hardened calves and over those pale thighs. My lips will shake. By midday we’ll have started a marathon of our old songs—Bryan Adams blaring loud, our voices shameless to any notion of key or tone—in the midst of cookie baking and kitchen dancing. I’ll have graduated from small pecks to ravenous sucking, possibly growling as you pin me against the noisy pantry door. I want your chest mottled purple and blue. At night’s edge we can stargaze and moon watch, warmed by the bonfire at our feet and my little orange house cat on our laps. The shadows of twilight will find us following their lead by dipping into a hot tub and sinking ever further into this mess, into each other. Everything touching, everything moving, everything as one. Everything as it was. Please, let me demonstrate how you could be loved again.