My lover is a television

My lover is a television playing fuzz on a loop. I am a remote. We don’t know if I am a broken remote or if he is a broken television. We don’t know if my batteries are dead or misplaced or alive. We don’t know if he is a working television with a broken satellite. We aren’t too sure how any of it works, the Apple TV or the wavering connection. And maybe the WiFi is out as it usually is. Because my lover is television fuzz, when he leaves me, he tells me he can never be with a remote again, but, weeks later, I see my lover
has found a new remote. You wouldn’t know she is any different than me, except the battery plate is missing, so we all know she is missing her power. When I saw her naked cavern on Instagram, I put my finger to the screen, trying to finger the open space. Then I cried and wrote a poem about an Orca who fell in love with a shark.

Olivia G. Rose is a writer from San Jose. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San José State University, where she won the Alan Soldofsky Award for Outstanding MFA Thesis and served as Reed Magazine's Senior Poetry Editor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Blood+Honey, Qu, PHIL LIT Journal, Cola, Red Coyote, Long River Review, and elsewhere.