Every union
must have a lover
and a beloved
as a hand
rubs the apple it’s about to feed its own mouth, or
how a gemstone serves time
in the body of the watch, shining behind the silver back-plate
as it would on a finger.
Neither me or your father was either, she says
her eyes down in the red
stain at the bottom of her emptied glass
and I remember them together
at the kitchen table, going
over calendars. Gardening separate corners
of the yard, arguing over whose turn it was
to mow. Each kiss
on an expected date. Anniversary. New Years.
Anniversary. Acting out
the image of a marriage, neither shining or thumbed.
Jessica Lee is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Narrative Magazine and an Editorial Reader for Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have been published in BOAAT, Fugue, Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, Passages North, Phoebe, Prairie Schooner, THRUSH, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest. Find her online at readjessicalee.com.