The Maynard
Spring 2018

0:00

 

 

Oxytocin Pandemic Love Poem

Last night we slipped into sheets so cold
I said it felt like being in a reverse ice cream sandwich.
Is that a thing? I wondered aloud, and though neither
of us had heard of this, we agreed it would be delicious,
if somewhat impractical. Months now since we’ve had
ice cream, now that leftovers have colonized our freezer,
one frozen cube at a time—lentil curry, cabbage soup,
a slow-cooked pulled pork—the fruit of fewer grocery trips.
So much imagination needed to picture life, whipped
showily out from the dish-loaded table, returning
to the state we nostalgically call normal. Before going
to sleep, you lie on your back reading, one arm stretched
across my pillow, my cheek suctioned to your chest.
No use disguising my motives: not romance but survival,
which might be the same thing. We are floating in space
in our 500 sq. ft. capsule. We are the plot
of a Hollywood movie about a couple on a mission to Mars.
Outside the capsule, the air is a chokehold, aerosol bullets
whizzing through ether. Your body is the only one
in the world that exists in 3-D. We touch often to remember
what touch feels like. Some nights, you rise from bed,
phlegm rattling in your lungs, to wheeze into your puffer—
the next day nonchalant as always. It’s only asthma. Allergies.
My amygdala wields a clipboard, tells me you are sick
of my ceaseless worrying. But you are as robust as you are
gentle, are kind, reassuring. Skin on skin: the love chemicals
show up for their shift, relieve the limbic brain of duty,
for some much needed R & R. Here is my breath.
And here it is again. Waiting for me in the last place I left it.