Give me creased books with those soft, held edges

of many lost winter afternoons.

Give me the plush dark red of a theater’s draped curtain

right before the lights go down.

Give me the hush of a million snowflakes.

Give me the sticky hand of my five-year-old niece

crossing streets toward a great unknown.

Give me the sunshine break of new day with failed attempts

to move lovers from where we lay.

Give me my first pottery class.

Give me the taste of fresh bread

and the whispers found only through a star-lit hike.

Give me the all the places your lips haven’t yet explored

with the shivers that commence.

Give me butter and salt with popped corn.

Give me good friends who ask good questions,

our spill of laughter like a bubble bath flood.

Give me the heat of a subway arriving,

breaking the spell of the man who busks for us.

Give me homemade anything.

Give me the thrill of kissing a stranger,

the comfort of realizing it’s you.

Give me that mid-December car ride

through a town lit up with the Christmas blues.

Give me a thigh squeeze.

Give me.

And I promise, I’ll receive.