"A Love Story" by Natalie Marino

While on an evening walk, we see two dogs mating in an abandoned lot full of tall grass.

Holding your hand in mine I look up at the moon looking like a coin caught between two cypress

trees. I wonder about the meaning of time, about disappearing fragments. To our right is a

fortune teller with old hands. I wonder if she knows I wore blue tonight to hear you say I look

beautiful, so I can believe in the future. Pale moths are flying above a closed divorce lawyer’s

office to our left. I wonder if what makes us human is self-consciousness, if we can be more than

disciples. I shut my eyes for a moment and imagine I can see an ecstatic field in the distance

waiting for morning. The streetlights have turned on now and I think of tomorrow as the ending

of a novel written in a new language. You ask me to remember dancing at our wedding and I tell

you that last night I dreamt of elephants. I decide that no matter how long we travel together

there will always be space between us. Beyond the end of the street is a body of water, probably

a mirage. I can see the sky swallow the sea.

Natalie Marino is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.