The Parallels
Donald Zirilli
I’m crying in your shoebox.
You’re laughing in my kitchen drawer,
beneath the Chinese menus.
Your window and my window
open their curtains on a single scene,
a comet pulsing against a red moon,
its signal falling on our rooftops.
You know what the antennae receive.
I know how much the water towers hold.
When we’re shopping for dinner,
we tend to buy the same cheap wine,
a red called Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.
We’ve been to Montepulciano,
shivering outside of an old stone cathedral,
but the wine hasn’t.
The wine is only telling us
the name of its grapes,
like a flushed penitent, dizzy and proud
in the dark confessional,
and we’re the priests
sitting quietly, taking it all in.
There’s only a whisper between us,
but, facing the same direction,
we see the ghosts of each other
seeing ghosts of ourselves.
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