“Tiny Machine,” by Dave Malone

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Tiny Machine

For lovers like us, time moves
backwards and forwards,
the tiniest machine in your palm
you take out on Sundays
and spin like gears of a hand watch.

Dappled sunlight on the oak post bed
turns into dark threads of rain.
Before we can eat brunch,
we are adrift in snow
outside my first apartment.

Before we can speak the language
of knowing each other, the shorthand
for gardening and taking out the glorious trash,
we are dropped on a railroad bed.
Under the blue moon, a locomotive
churns through the pine forest.
Blinded, we weep like newborns
until arms join in the utter, forest dark.

—Dave Malone, from O: Love Poems from the Ozarks

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Photo by Jeffrey Smith, Creative Commons, via Flickr. “Tiny Machine” first ran at San Pedro River Review. Music by Wayne Blinne.

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