Latency of the Heart

(He) Farthest relay: the sailcloth hums like a hive in winter, thinner.
My message wafer leaves my glove and becomes a year.
I write you slow so the future won’t smudge.

(She) Nearer the sun, brine tea keeps its warmth long enough
for one paragraph. Your last letter arrived with help—
predictive completion smoothing a verb you never use.

(He) I read what I may have said. It fits
like a borrowed jumper: warm, then wrong at the wrists.
I let the system guess one adjective; the sky accepts it.

(She) The upgrade learns our weather. It finishes a memory
I had not told you: the comet patch stiff with salt.
I fold the page as if to break the spell.

(He) Decades stand between our vowels. We can be kept—
by a gentle forgery that fills the gap like padded silence—
or speak in honest winters with no reply.

(She) I toggle the assist to zero, and the cursor blinks,
lamp-brown, like a far beacon running out of oil.
Across the distance, I wait for your silence to arrive, unmade.