Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom
by Cade Smith
My love is learning his language again through scrounged-up pdfs and folk music and the ages-away voice of a great-great-great-or-so-grandfather, guitar crackling slightly harsh over the phone as he plays love songs to me and explains what they mean. I dream that night of a house that might be my aunt’s, wrong side of the family, dim and hot and near-empty save for the stragglers of myself, my cousins, and our childhood books on the shelf in a landlord-white room that hasn’t yet been painted over. I am hiding when the doorbell rings to reveal my love’s past-life friend, remembered fondly, here as a supposed second-cousin-x-removed, and with everyone too drunk to care who the hell he is or isn’t, he slips in the door easily. In the dream my lover is not here with me (with my family, for good reasons, locational or otherwise) and his good once-friend finds me in the books bearing a bottle of wine and a handful of bright little things he said my lover has found for me. The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh over guesses as to which trinkets were lifted or not, loving, lighthearted, knowing that the origin of the things does not lessen the love with which they were given. I wake warm off dream-wine.
