“I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house. Nothing today hasn’t happened before: I woke alone, bundled the old dog into his early winter coat, watered him, fed him, left him to his cage for the day closing just now. My eye drifts to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling, as they do, in a late fall light that melts against the turning oak and smelts its leaves bronze. Before you left, I bent to my task, fixed in my mind the slopes and planes of your face; fitted, in some essential geography, your belly’s stretch and collapse against my own, your scent familiar as a thousand evenings. Another time, I might have dismissed as hunger this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing, but today I crest the hill, secure in the company of my longing. What binds us, stretches: a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling, supple, misses the wind.” LovePoetryLongingLeavingMissing Someone Author:Donika Kelly