kiss at lake michigan, mid-february it was in the kiss by the lake, the moon looming and orange as we strolled toward shoreline, snow piled with sand, the news crew hurrying toward the edge of the lip of night waiting for the aperture’s capture of winter’s last light, that I realized in the clutch of your arm there are other people in the world of stone and steel not unlike us, their buildings alive with electricity, the elevated lines’ distant murmur humbling us to that architecture, like theirs, which loops in our lips, in that kiss by the lake in the first warmth of spring © Nicole Cartwright Denison