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.