(I borrowed the first line from each couplet in Luisa A. Igloria’s “Ghazal of Rain” and replaced her second lines with my own. Her original lines appear in italics.)
This is the only time machine with a curtain:
hours, minutes, seconds: draped and pleated into lines.
A skylight amplifies the pinging of the oldest message:
under the moonlight, ‘I love you’ outweighs other lines.
Towels grow damp from moisture in the bath—
gather basket, take clothespins, hang them out on lines.
The tongues of books lie close to each other.
They each dream of what’s written between others’ lines.
No one knows if the silverfish nest elsewhere, if they curl
up fetal, or stretch out in sketches of fine pencil lines.
Is it worth doing laundry, fighting shirt collars’ resistance
to starch, folding trousers to iron their seams into lines?