Today you start with, it’s getting colder
and colder here, to knit us together
with a common chatline thread.
What about there?
Thinking about my answer, again,
I forget what I repeated a hundred times
to myself to talk about: the dream
of a time we are back together.
I, a young girl, plait my hair and glance
out of the corner of my eye
at the neighbor’s roof. You, a young man,
peek from the roof, give me the cue
to come over. My mother is busy
taking her wedding quilt into the yard
for a cotton carder she has called in the street.
He beats through the cotton, as I slip
out the door. We rush to the attic.
Your mother has gone shopping.
Our naked bodies are two threads,
brown. Your breath stitches to mine.
You type in Farsi and place a linking
icon beside your lines, so that we are woven
together in the fabric of the time past.
Can’t you move to a country closer by?
Can you speak to a lawyer or do something
to bring me over to Canada?
I have no Farsi font
so write my silence in English.
I should have known distance
would tear us apart at the seams.
I imagine your face becoming tight
like a shrunken shirt as I read your lines
and think how short I got my haircut this time,
how I am tired of wearing a stretched cloth,
how I always knew you were not patient
enough from the way you hurried me every winter
I was knitting you a new warm sweater.
What can a lawyer do? Canada’s immigration
has no provision for lovers’ applications.
My finger trembles on the keys.
If only I could pull the thread
to bring you out of the screen.
I push my nails into my palm
until it hurts. I think we are caught
on the yarn of it. The person who knits
this world into a village has dropped
the ball and it is rolling away fiercely.
