Sexy admires a good perforation: the pickle jar’s shrink-wrap that snaps open at the designated seam, the salt cracker’s occasional miracle of the crumbless break. The world is held together with such commitments, with agreements that build their undoing into their architecture. Indeed, this world cleaves. He looks at the outdated map on his wall, then at the lovers on TV. Some science says atoms never touch. Yet here they are, he thinks, two as an image of completeness. The actors, their bodies, right there in the slack of that sagging sofa. Their primetime lives sewn together by thin threads of breath beginning to fray in the flickering blue light.
Copyright © 2018 Douglas S. Jones. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.