Laura Marshall Behr

Today, she will join him picking blackberries. She will tell him jokes. She will pluck out the very best ideas she keeps in her head from the science books they've read together. Looking at her reflection in the glass, she feels suddenly unfamiliar, muttering aloud, "Either he'll tell me he loves me or he won't." The thermostat reads over ninety, she feels the sun's warmth on her skin, radiating through the breakfast room window. While he is napping, she will sneak away from him in the bedroom into the kitchen. She will bake him a blackberry cobbler. When he wakes, she will surprise him. They will eat from the same bowl, sharing one spoon.

Dawn rushes in early,
dividing the world.
Hearts peeled.

Where the kudzu swallows the mountain I picture us.
Spontaneously and unprompted, crossing a line or
the green transom bridge, and the rows and rows
of tin-roofed boathouses. In the valley, we stop for coffee,
and witness a brown horse crane her neck over a barbed-wire fence
for a taste of creek water, water trough easily within reach.
I didn't want to protest or ask you any questions. It's easier
to agree with you all of this is random. The wind's passion reverses
directions near Blue Springs. We swim at our own risk. The water,
ice cold with minnows. I knew saying this would unsay other things,
smashing minutes, seeking after possibilities I've stopped trying to sort.
Let the moments fall like shadows over the face of dawn. It's not
the first time, attempting to place fear behind me, that even the light
feels cold when you are away. Reminders elusive as evening mist
assure me it's easier to mistake luck for other things when there are
no answers. Hoping for perfect against certainty. Taking charge
of probabilities, I'd grown complacent with what is to come. Sensing
in your quiet patterns, as weightless as they are real. Two steadfast magnets,
with a secret. Maybe we are settling a bet. These were the moments
clocked in the hush of dove wing beats. Listening to the pure motion,
birds ascending, breathless, dove-tailing into each other.
Two shadows converging in the promise of love's presence.
Salvaged, open, and broken to each other.