Bunnysitting

Every day for a week and a day
   I thread seven minutes north
      the car a needle, thread soot
   softened by like-hued concrete
      a city, street. Stitch the same
bridge glimpsing the fly fisher
   flip a line into the same rill of
      silvered river, sliver of sun
   shining from behind mountains
      onto the river and rearview.

Into their apartment, where I
   hay them, fill up their water bowl.
How many other lives I could have led.
      I scan the bindings of books on books.
   Sometimes my two year old is with me.
Sometimes I am alone. Both
   have a softness of familiarity as in
      the softness of hue in a parking
   lot or street. From the window
past overcast valley, mountains.

I have been putting off sewing up
      the hem of a wool coat, gone
   unworn all winter but next week, late
      March, I do. And it is not the trial
   of tedium I expect this week and day
      because as I sew across the long
line of hem I think how warm
   and heavy wearing it will be. And
   I see the wool, split from itself,
      coming together.

Lauren Tess’s poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Salamander, Meridian, Cimarron Review, and with the Academy of American Poets. She received a 2021 Open Mouth Poetry Residency in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently lives with her family in Missoula as she pursues an MFA at the University of Montana.