| This was, to put it simply, a moving-on poem. A poem reckoning with the stubbornness of severed infatuation. I wrote the poem during the pandemic about a long-distance pandemic romance, which felt always encased in the surreal, even in its most real and unflinching moments. I found myself relying on the miracle of collapsed distance that dreaming often affords us in grief—suddenly, I could be, indeed, across the country in a Mustang with a man who days earlier had a change of heart. The poem's drafting also taught me that sometimes we need to put the poem away and just communicate—directly, with heart.
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