I think of you in that poppy field
your red lips bleeding secrets,
emerald stalks, blending scarlet scars into flesh. My cold shoulder
when I turned my face away

it seems like a trick of the light, now. When I reach my fingers across our bed, tangle a lock of your hair around my bitten fingernails

we pretend to forget the little things, like if we take sugar in our coffee or who's turn it is to take out the trash

we promise to hold onto the best parts, as if we are dolls that can be dismantled and remade by the hands of a child

but it's the laughs that disappear first, like the poppies whose petals we blew away so carelessly,

thinking there was a whole field when really there was just

us