Smoke. Dissonance. The floor with a heartbeat.

[Then_____A_____flat line].

No mountain peaks here. Only a single postcard
and girls with too much skin. I hid your love in
my backpack because you call it Pandora
or Diaspora or something Joseph Campbell once
underlined in a book. And you said:
God           crawls       in trees
and writes in sunset-colored leaves,  so
you moved to Arizona so you could
burn your hands in the desert writing
[sad things] in the sand.  But the fishhooks in my
door keep me from
following you, and that
backpack I left on a downtown sidewalk named me
[a terrorist], anyway. I heard it was a massacre.
Broken hearts painted all over the left turn lane on
Main Street. The organ, not the geometry.  And
when Edgar Allen Poe sent a      s o u n d-w a v e  up
your arm, you said you understood why  I could
always taste the color red. That’s when you started
painting monochromatic. When a  stranger’s face
found herself staring out of your wall. The owner of
the heartbeat in the  carpet. The breather of the
smoke in the air.  They say you draw the curtains
when the sun rises so her eyes never dry out. I say
you always loved  the blind more than the deaf.
Lovecraft believes  monsters hide in caves. Clearly he
was all about  the Craft.
I’m all about the way you say my name eight

states away under the stare of another woman’s face.
You sewed your pinkie to your ring finger and said you
couldn’t make any more promises. You never made
anything but [music] to begin with.
Dissonance.
I like
acoustic guitars and Vivaldi. You like sonic warfare and
things that bleed. But it was only when you said carving
love into trees was blasphemy when I finally realized,  after
all of this,      [we were never even meant to be].

~Kayla Grose