Folding Paper Planes

Sonnet

Each year in love is an arrow-pointed plane
pressed to flying form from printer paper
snatched from the office of our lives, with our names
added in a heart between the layers
somewhere secret only we could know —
every edge is crisp, both wings are even,
as it flies like a timeless rhyme from Cupid’s bow —
it swoops like a dove above the year’s events,
riding a gust — an afternoon of lust —
past COVID-stalled vacations, two new jobs,
Swedish hoomans, seaside weekends with just
us, dreaming about the empty lot
we made into a new home — not the least
fold in this year’s plane, a promising crease.

And like the paper planes, I can’t help but fly
past the guardrails that the poem puts
across the page, tied to a year passed by
because my favorite part, and this is the truth,
is taking up your ink-stained hand in mine
to toss another heart into our sky.