From CutBank 79
Skyping
We must have suspected from the beginning
that the darkness we marked
with animals & objects & gods could be crossed.
Things will be different our ancestors said & meant
our children will have crayons enough
to color fire. Will lie at night
in the warm bed of their less-sadness & ask the stars for what the stars
will send them. Then,
you were that kind of bright, star-
heavy, & left me staring at the flight tracker in Terminal C. Screen
filled with leaving, each
plane a pulsing cross above the continent. I wanted
there to be, on each one, a box
whose job it was to whisper I exist. Just this,
over & over so I’d know. I know
a couple, you said, who spend
their entire lives apart. They put
the coffee on in their separate cities & flip
their laptops open to show each other what the sunlight is like. I like
to imagine them making dinner together in their separate
sunlit windows, the recipe a medley of vegetables & wherever it is
they live— the pinch of salt, the small talk. The coq au vin
steaming on the screen. In São Paulo, you lean
back in the radiance of 800 dpi. I ask if you want to, & we take
our clothes off & are transfigured instantly into pixels. Into packets
of light in the sky over Miami. & I
am thinking again of that couple, of their love
like love, & how you will lie
beside me tonight in the whirring box of my laptop. I’ll turn
you low, & we’ll lie there
while its tiny light pulses off & on in the darkness
like someone breathing. Our bodies
like continents that were touching once.
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Christopher Kempf is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Chicago. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, his poetry and essays have appeared most recently in Gulf Coast, Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books' “Marginalia” blog, The New Inquiry, The New Republic, Ninth Letter, and Prairie Schooner, among other places. He received his MFA from Cornell University.