Leaflet

Bone pricked fingers peel back another glossy, another glassy petal. They unwrap their jaded mother and her colors are left wilting and oh so homeless beside her. Our lady of the flowers weeps into our sordid fingers, stained chlorophyll green. Stained with more than that.

It’s not so soundless in the forest when I hold your hand and you hold mine. Not that there’s much of a difference, when all it comes down to are the bodies (blurring lines, they are not our own, never have we held our own). But it’s okay because be it you or me, the air tastes sick and sweet, not so unlike your tongue, held heavy upon my own.

It feels like our lungs will shake the forest to its roots, each inhale an earthquake and each exhale such a resounding tsunami. The aftermath follows fast and eager, the displaced leaflets dropping like bombs from their sap-riddled nests. They shed young blood on the sunshine, retaliatory first rays sizzle on newborn backs and with this sight, who couldn’t cough (and cough and hack) up a prayer or two? All this blood and all this blood for not, but we’ll give the only apology we’re good for.

One victim stops to rest upon our lifeline, our flesh and blood curse. You run one finger up the seal, cleansing, and God, we feel the shudder in our bones. So small it seems, the little line of rosy skin, but who would have known how it holds us up, tall and together. Conjoined the doctor said, and he did not breathe a lie. And between us, it’s deafening, the heart we share. The rhythm winds through the veins of the ivy and ferns and leaf carpet floor, restless, always restless. But burdened, for it has taken on a job meant for two.

It wasn’t heavy in hand and the splinter-laden branches have no complaint, laughing the loop out of reach on a breeze. Your twin dimples shine and burn blood under the weight of my kiss, one last one before our hands unwind. The trunk's wooden heart throbs as we climb, sighs under our wrists crossed and a shining new purpose, but it breathes no complaint.

What solace we’ve found in these trees, what a friend. In their gnarled, reaching limbs, no end in sight and no beginning. We’re one in the same, a family found in defects. A love we’ll hang by a thread to prove.

Our seal was broken when we fell, and spilt was our love and our organs on show. They found us like that. They found us home with our heart dangling red and bright on our sleeves.