Dale Champlin

Perfect Touch

Even now you are mine, the scent
of you permeates our sheets.
This very minute you could walk away.
I know I am the cure to your malaise—
the only treatment for your ailment.
Our end so near to us flickers like a hologram.
Winters and winters and winters past—flurried
into a powder of snow. This was our life—
and now, how briefly we remain.
Would we ever have had enough? Do you
remember our meeting in the grocery store?
Do you remember dropping my bag
of groceries? Five dollars wasted—supplies
for an entire week. A dozen eggs smashed,
the peanut butter jar cracked in half,
enough rice for a wedding celebration,
a whole plucked chicken rolling on the blacktop.
After that things could only improve.
Do you remember our first touch?
Our lives shimmered before us like a mirage—
golden as we were then. This must be
what people mean when they say their lives
flashed before their eyes. Not as a precursor
to death but as a glimpse into the future.
Hold me now as you did then. Love me
but don’t look back.

Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine arts. She is the editor for
Verseweavers and director of Conversations With Writers. Dale has published in
VoiceCatcher, North Coast Squid, Willawaw Journal, Mojave River Press, The Opiate,
and other publications. In November, 2019 she published her first collection, The
Barbie Diaries, with Just a Lark Books.