BETWEEN HERE AND SOMETHING ELSE

By Elizabeth Gunn

Ordering another mineral water  that comes in a tall, glass bottle  as if it were the sea on its side  and expectant, I wait for you. 

The other couple  (we are not a couple I remind myself)  orders their drinks: coffee  and green tea. I wait for you. 

For whom am I waiting?  How many lives have you lived?  How many times have we met?  How many millennia do I wait? 

I check my watch, and the server  checks with me. She pours  my mineral water from its tall,  glass bottle into a stout, clear vessel. 

Ice disappears. I think  of the lexicographer, the dendrophile,  the shoebill stork that does not smile  or blink. I long for you. 

For whom am I waiting in this neon city of mad bodies and beleaguered innuendos? The reader sets the timer. I stop 

counting minutes and hours and years. The sea is on its side and then it is an orange desert again showing its marine fossils – brachiopods and corals. Still life. 

Still in time, across from me, you are ordering tap water into words. I pour my madness into love, as if it were the only surge beyond being.

---

BIO:

Elizabeth S. Gunn serves as the Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Business at Nevada State University. She writes poetry and fiction in Henderson, Nevada, where she and her wife live with their three rescue pups in the endless Mojave Desert.