How about loving again by Kashiana Singh

How about listening?

How about playing scrabble, me letting your cheating go along?

How about looking into each other’s eyes

     when talking, or making love?

How about encrypting dreams in sloppy journal entries, that also had a tiny lock?

How about telling each other about hobbies, like when

     you found a butterfly stamp and I had the same in my album?

How about collecting every letter or word we write to each other

     again, and then carrying them in bags across oceans

     recalling how you had to leave behind your harmonica instead?

How about lemon tart on a whim and a drive just for the heck of it?

How about jokes that make no sense at all, still making me smile?

How about that one coffee pod you sent inside the crisp folds of onion paper

      the letter you traveled 20 miles to post; your Kerala trip

      and the instructions to not to tell your mother since you

      did not want it to seem you are in love?

How about the shirt I wore inside out pottering around my mother’s kitchen

      before she gently nudged me about public display of love bites?

How about the way you talk to yourself

      and then pretend you were really talking to me?

How about the edge of the marble top table that chipped in transition

      the little blue corner I keep on my dresser, in memory of our first home?

How about your palpitating response when our daughter chose

     to reveal her word skills with ‘papa’ before ‘mama’

     because I was out at work, as I always was, anyways?

How about the guess work with our son’s unvoiced expressions?

      playing charades at grocery stores, and watching him patiently

     enact his demand for a pink hubba bubba gum?

How about singing into my tired bones

      just so we could quarrel about the choice of songs?

How about just old-fashioned love, where respect was hip

      and straight stemmed roses could even break hearts?

How about the repetition of similar dialogues

      those where you begin and I end. or vice versa often?

How about falling in love again, love and its demons

     held together like all the photo frames you ever installed?

Kashiana Singh (http://www.kashianasingh.com/) calls herself a work practitioner and embodies the essence of her TEDx talk – Work as Worship into her everyday. She proudly serves as a Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her newest full-length collection, Woman by the Door was released with Apprentice House Press in 2022. Kashiana lives in North Carolina and carries her various geopolitical homes within her poetry.