Lovers’ Applications

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.