Getting Back Together

We sat around unpacking boxes. I had a baby
on the way, and the new nursery was still full of past lives
carefully wrapped in paper and taped shut. My family

had come down to help, and you were somewhere
miles away, as you had been for years, the two of us
clumsily circling the future like two kites getting

tangled up the same tree. But then Aunt Jean bent over
to root through the bubble wrap, her fingers twisting
in studded pleather straps, a muttered What's this?

before triumphantly pulling it out: our old strap-on,
the blue dildo we'd taken to bed a decade earlier, purchased
from some old queen, probably not actually old, probably

younger than we are now, who'd lounged behind
the counter of a Philadelphia sex shop with pink hair
and an understanding smile. And I won't say

that was the moment my heart tipped back toward you —
we both know it took much longer — only that I began
then to sense the ways I might still be changed.