A Tuesday Night By Douglas S. Jones

Sexy admires a good perforation:
the pickle jar’s shrink-wrap

that snaps open at the designated seam,
the salt cracker’s occasional miracle

of the crumbless break. The world is held
together with such commitments,

with agreements that build their undoing
into their architecture. Indeed, this world cleaves.

He looks at the outdated map on his wall, then
at the lovers on TV. Some science says atoms never touch. Yet

here they are, he thinks, two as an image of completeness.
The actors, their bodies, right there in the slack

of that sagging sofa. Their primetime lives
sewn together by thin threads of breath beginning to fray

in the flickering blue light.