Do you seek my truth?
words may cut like Winter's wind,
bare, but never false.

The dusty yellow of sticky nectar
smears her face, opalescent,
the kind of glow you’d see in a dream
before it turns nightmare.
He sits across from her,
ambition cracked like the dry riverbed
of his father’s voice,
leaking out into the room,
spilling his senses in a game of tag
he will never win.

Their conversation is a war—
drones buzz overhead,
their bodies weightless as insects,
but the gore is real:
blood on the walls,
blood in the silence between
one bitter word and the next.
What did they fight for?
Pride? A crumb of it?
The thing dissolves like sugar
in a child’s fist—
sticky, stained,
but gone.

And at the end of it,
only children remain.
Not the ones they bore,
but the ones they still are:
small, angry,
married to a promise
no one ever explained.

They imagine pastures,
green as forgiveness,
wet as birth.
But the watering is endless,
the grass never grows.

I let him speak,
his words uncoiled like smoke
in the quiet room,
each sentence a serpent
wrapping itself
around the soft throat of the night.

He spoke of boredom,
of voices like dead birds
falling from the trees,
of his hands
searching the air
for the tender pillars of life,
and squeezing,
until silence became a god.

I listened uneasily,
my breath a quiet river,
my heart a stone
sinking into its depths.
His voice brushed against my skin,
and I held it,
like holding a flame
bare-handed.

Then he stopped.
The silence cracked.
His fingers felt my pulse—
a stillness I could not hide.
It betrayed me.
But I, too,
held his hand,
offering my quietness
as a gift,
a wall,
a mirror.

Now I wake in another room,
safe from his dreaming.
But the night carries his voice,
a tide that laps against
the shore of my memory.

Did I save myself?
Did I save him?
Or are we both
adrift in the dark sea
of what was left unsaid?

The day we met, my world folded in on itself,

Jasmine wilting in my hair, petals falling like warnings.

You held me like a lifeline, but the ground still opened,

Swallowing me whole before I could learn your name.

Now I want you gone, not just from my skin,

But from the archive of my grief,

Erased from the map of my heart, its borders sealed.

You lean on me, the horizon you forget to name.

I hold the weight of your storms,

turning them into songs the earth understands.

When I am gone, the wind grows teeth,

and your words, sharp as broken shells, scatter.

Yet I remain, woven into the weave of your breath,

an ache, a promise, a steady drumbeat of love.