She looked at him,
her anger was the wind
that swept across her forehead
the way his lips had
done before and the sun that blinded her
was the vision of his fingertips
on someone else’s collarbone and
she couldn’t look away from
what blinded her.
But her eyes burned and
he was the sun or was he destruction
and she couldn’t think because he was himself
but she was not her and together they were
the wind that rattled her brain.
He looked at her as she shook her head,
was he the earthquake that made her
tremble or was it the reverberation
of his words that made her unstable?
He could see fault-lines form across her chest,
he traced them, he read them but could not understand
because he was not the same and yesterday she was not her and
now he was not himself. She was a tree,
he was flames, together they were chaos
They were insanity and sense
and he told her she felt like the roots of a redwood but
someone else had felt like the stars.
Flames made the stars burn brighter and he couldn’t be destruction.
She showed him the ashes in her eyes and the embers on her skin,
she asked if that was not what he couldn’t be.
Silence answered her and she turned away
to find a storm
to baptize her new.