In Ten Years

by Jo Taylor

—Valentine’s Day, 2024

when we are eighty, we will watch Gunsmoke together

for the first time, you falling in love with Miss Kitty 

for the thousandth time, I fooling around with Festus’ 

poetic language. I will finally ignore your knee-length                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

white socks, and you will allow me a house fully lighted,

not a chance of dimmers or twenty-five-watt bulbs. You will 

split the air with your handwritten poem, promise crammed and 

full of passion, like you did when you were twenty, and then

you will place it in a box numbered 173, purchased 

at an antique shop when we were fifty, to allow me to retrieve

that long-expected valentine from the post office number 

of my childhood. I could have friends deliver long-stem roses

every half hour throughout the day like I did when we celebrated

your forty, but then again, maybe not—in ten years, it could be

as difficult for us to find friends as it was for Abraham to find

ten righteous men in Sodom. Perhaps we will float down 

the crystal-clear Ichetucknee in summer in our battery-heated

black vests after we have struggled down the embankment

and onto the float, laughing maniacally like we did when 

we discovered the icy springs at thirty. We will play footsies 

with the fish, holding fast to each other as if our lives depend upon it.