she jostles under the vine serpents,
knees scraping trees,
green light bending onto her skin.
she’s a dirt daughter
shoeless, careless
the breeze reinvents her smile.
she arrives
her toes press hard against the sidewalk,
and she takes a clinical step forward
her pale moon face
begged by the wilderness to return.
on the other side of the street he bursts from
the subway, his feet neatly clicking up
the stairs.
his briefcase swings
tightly on his hand
his dazed green eyes scurry across
tuesday’s bachelorettes
and they fall in love at least a dozen times.
he arrives
when they stumble into the same civilization
their eyes collide.
they could be blinded.
or they could catch it.
it would run under their skin
like voiceless hummingbirds
awakening their architecture
and electrocuting their blood.
yet love doesn’t just happen to
to the yin and the yang,
or the bird and the bee.
people aren’t perfect puzzle pieces.
love happens best to the disbelievers,
to the fighters, and the skeptics.
it happens to those who know that in order
to make a spark,
you need some friction.
it’s a howl of wind:
constant and spontaneous.
it can vanish and evolve:
always new.
it can braid lives together
like a man with green eyes
and a woman with a pale moon face.
maybe its all been done before.
but there’s something about the way
he juggles a sentence on his lips
and how her face rearranges into a smile
that seems new.
the story doesn’t always sound like this
but humans are like destinations
intersected and scattered
life comes and goes
and sometimes
Love arrives.