i couldn’t sway my head around the fact
that my grandparents stayed together
for 54 years

it made me wonder
just how many times
they had to forgive each other
to last that long

I need your warm fog-breath
on my skin
akin to the way
trees need morning dew to kiss them
in all the right places.

The petals cling—
not out of need,
but by nature.
Crushed silk
beneath my boots,
they rise with each step,
trailing inside
like secrets.
I didn’t mean
to bring the outside in,
but they hitchhike
on rubber treads,
on the hush of my leaving.
Now they scatter
across tile and rug,
bright bits of ruin
that refuse to stay buried.
They mark where I’ve been—
not loudly,
just enough.
A quiet bloom
in the hallway,
a whisper of red
by the door.
Nothing dies,
it just follows.

Your eyes were deep oceans.
Salted with pain.
Drained from our veins.
I have a fear of drowning in you.
Silent confessions were like opioids.
The feelings that consume my heart
are now bone deep.
My cells know.
Why my blood runs slow.
When you kiss my pale
pouty lips.  
Further I slip into
the waves of you.

Thunder, not as a warning but as a laugh—
a full-throated, sky-splitting laugh
tumbling from the belly of the storm,
like the earth itself cracked a joke too big to hold.

It does not whisper; it declares.
It does not creep; it arrives with bare feet
and a crown of smoke,
startling the still air into movement,
startling the blood back into its wild rhythm.

The trees do not cower—they listen.
Their leaves twitch not in fear but reverence,
like congregants beneath a sermon
too ancient to be translated,
too holy to be ignored.

The river flinches, then remembers itself—
how to twist, how to speak in a thousand glimmers,
how to run with purpose toward anything vast.
Even the stones, quiet things that they are,
seem to hum beneath the impact.

And you—
You feel it in the chest first,
like a second heart waking up,
a pulse older than language,
older than name.

You want to follow it,
to chase the flash behind the eyes of the sky,
to stand where the clouds tear open with joy
and pour out all their hidden heat.

This is the rapture of life—
barefaced and unashamed,
shouting itself into being again and again,
in the only tongue the heavens trust.