What I Want in the End
To know that we were lucky.
To know even in the best case
life is a heartbreaker.
When the late summer air
burns like the last ember
of our affair,
when the sun sinks in the sky
and a melancholy wind
swallows
the passing afternoon,
when we share our last bowl
of cut up cantaloupe,
I want to remember love
as a yellow field.
Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Pleiades, Rust + Moth, Salt Hill, South Florida Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California.