6.

When we are no longer young. When our start-up & wind-down love affairs are over, when I refuse to meet you for coffee because I'm tired of hearing about your son's aversion to dark corners, hidden edges, when you try running to me because your husband is nagged & pecked to death, when your fat Persian cat hums neglect in all its lives, when I am a silent ear to your primal voice behind your latest artificial language, when we are nothing but two bodies lying in opposite sides of the cemetery--then where will our Teddy Bears be? We haven't thought about them for years. But you buried your very first wisdom teeth in one. The one that was mine. & he never talked.

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Match Book, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and elsewhere. His latest collection of prose/poetry is Void & Sky from Outskirt Press. Kyle lives and writes in New Jersey.

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