Plastic cutlery

There were times when this spring
swallowed winter. One is never quite home,
the way names serve for plastic cutlery.
As if I knew them once in a house
full of lessons and empties. These hooks
that brought me close to you feign other nights
now changed in me. I met you close to Holy Ground
an unexpected ball in play, and we had things
to say, the day I met you in a time of plague.
How exhausting it is to recall that no memory
is sacred. A car alarm heard in the snow
where the sun lit the woodlands.
This life that is never quite
returning.

Jonathan Jones lives and works in Rome where he teaches at John Cabot University. He has a PhD in literature from the University of Sapienza, and a novella 'My Lovely Carthage' recently published in the spring of 2020 from J. New Books.