Summer Was Forever
–Chen Chen

Time dripped from the faucet like a magician’s botched trick.
I did not want to applaud it. I stood to one side & thought,
What it’s time for is a garden. Or a croissant factory. What kind
of work do I need to be doing? My parents said: Doctor,
married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop,
your life sucks. But sometimes no one said anything & I saw
him, the local paper boy on his route. His beanstalk frame
& fragile bicycle. & I knew: we would be so terribly
happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme
with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.
I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,
unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was
in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps
on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.