We met in Maplewood for dinner,
a dive bar with a stale aroma
and staler pretzel dangling from 
the esca of an angler fish, our waiter
depositing the metal hook with
astonishing nonchalance. It is peculiar
to unite somewhere that is not the other’s
bedroom, just across the hall, now across 
a restaurant table. 

Here, there is no chandelier
installed too low, never raised, even years after
inheriting Grandma’s dining table whose chairs
she couldn’t climb into after the back injury. 
Its sagging pendants hanging just above our noses,
where we would duck, exchange knowing glances
as Dad drunkenly prepared his plate before 
bringing it downstairs, Mom eating silently
on the couch after one of us served her, our blinks
a morse code of warnings, solidarity, release. 

In this new light, there is the weight
dropped from the stress of new jobs,
the familiar scent of your laundry 
on clothes I did not know you owned, items
I cannot steal from your closet. Things
only sensed after sustained separation.

We talk about coworkers and students
and dating and how we’re broke, how you wish
adulting was as simple as entrusting me to enter 
motherlode repeatedly while you replenished
our snacks, those rainy afternoons glued to the desktop,
headlong toward the usual landing strip
of Mom and Dad, which one we last spoke to, 
what they said, how they are.

Once more, we are the only two at the dinner table,
conversing to delay clean-up—I, the food scraper, 
and you, the washer—until we notice the oven clock, 
rush to your room, you, my pretty, my beautiful sister,
honest amid this charade of playing house, until
the waiter looks over one too many times 
at our cleared table, a signed receipt sitting on its edge.

We grab our purses. We must get going.
It is time to go home. 

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