Airport Embrace

We were here, watching the forgotten
baggage cart slip away from the teenaged
couple. It bore a box with beaten corners, kept
from bursting by clear bands of tape. The lovers
held their wrists to pledge let’s never come or go
and the cart drifted on with its box, toward a band
of smokers who stood in the terminal’s dark
skirts. Their breath burnished the vaulting glass
into cellophane, which they peered through to us
who leaned there in shame, listening and hugging
our luggage at the edge of the frozen carousel.

Tobias Peterson holds an MFA in Poetry from Texas State University. His work has appeared in The Gulf Coast Review, Phantom Drift, Figroot Press, Coldnoon, and elsewhere. He teaches at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington.