By Athena Kildegaard

Remember how you cut up a hundred
give or take tiny red pink white hearts
sharp scissors nothing better to do or anyway
the willingness to postpone other things
for love and you put them in a folded paper
on which you wrote I hope you did a love poem
though I do not remember it blushing now
since I should remember it anyway the idea
was he would take the folded paper out
of the envelope unfold it and be confettied
with tiny hearts which did not happen
in the joyful way you intended this I do
remember it was February and static built up
and all those damn hearts stuck to one another
and the paper on which might or might not have
been a love poem and what I want you to know
is that he and I are together still electric and sticky.

~~~

Athena Kildegaard is the author, most recently, of Prairie Midden, winner of the WILLA Literary Prize. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, Ecotone, North American Review, RHINO, Rattle, and elsewhere. She lives in rural west-central Minnesota.