It could happen: we come home to find
the kitchen flooded, cat gone
down the fire escape, all the typos in all the books
burrowed like fleas in the rug. The walls have
the disconcerting blankness
of correction fluid. Worst of all, our keepsakes
have jumped ship, they are no less and no more
anchored in this world than the snapped stems
of the spent geraniums. No, the worst—
the terrible things we’ve said to each other, aloud
and in our soundproof dreams,
pock the ceilings, dangle like the fringes
of the Mexican blanket. This would be
the bursting of two good lives into an unrequited
craving, loosed in the apartment like a child
left at home alone for the first time.

—Jessica Hornik