#mooneyedandglowing

all that is left of you is tethered to a tremor.

your absence widens, and keeps on widening until we are finally separate.

the gulf between us is a star-fed river.

the gulf between us is a light-starved chasm.

I watch you convulse, collapse into yourself.

you, a soft nebulous shadow that grows warm and bright, incandescent, from a seed.

so quiet. so very quiet.

you spin away in the vacuum of space. pulse light. scintillate morse code answers.

i hear the silence.

i hear everything you want to say.

met again. scuff marks on collared shirts forgiving all that sometimes happens and one-in-a-million alters right turns when a left would've sufficed.

june opens its mouth into a circle, and wet moon dreams pour, bury, syllable-long love.

fish, cre- -scen- t, bone, shell— this soft, organic memory of you.

this grief-sediment that ages, compresses, into fossil

over time

becomes poems on picture-stone.

now this return of a ghost from the shadows, moth-soft.

its breath visibly pleated inside a small unspeaking mouth.

its beaded eyes, condensed obsidian spheres, moonflower intense.

i befriend darkness by its wings that are half sheen half lace. and measure space by its wingspan to travel light years into the past. when you and I were aflutter against blinding love.

i tell you "i am lost without you."

"love doesn't need a memory" you whisper.

"i wish …" i begin to say

but every memory dissolves into diffused light.

you've left, and grief the size of a broken nest sits tender in my heart —its small, defenceless frame.

i bring it twig after twig, and rebuild its every gutted chamber. i slowly re-remember its warp and weft from memory.

i line its hollow air with feather, felt, and song.

its indefinite, inescapable weight, pulls. it sits sharp against my wingbeat.

and i become a flightless bird forever homing in to that brokenness, held in sorrow at the fork and ruin.

the sea is endless beyond our dreaming.

on my forehead, on my palms, lines of destiny pulsate fluid as waves. signals call and trace your undulation.

you slip, iridescent nebulous, through seascape. a soft grey-green shadow.

a tiny blip on the map I keep hidden in my heart.

i know how to find you.