“Our Window,” A Love Poem

Sometimes, the air smells of you when I unlock our mahogany dust-coated chest

Captured whiffs from the past that never seem to dissolve like the feeling of an intimate kiss on damp, bare skin.

Once, I wipe the dust off, staining my hands

with hints of dried tears and fallen petals of bleeding hearts

the lock slips off,

and I peer in the kaleidoscope of this still world,

the fresh scent of pine trees will escape, but they remain trapped inside where the wind brushes and leaves and comes back.

Locks of laughter emerge, hushed whispers under warm sheets in darkness, save for the glow of untouched, locked phone screens.

Hands held and hearts held. Shudders seen

fixed loving gazes where you study me, exposed in the eye of the lens, but I’ll stare back, reading the words:

Decipher, if we can, hidden sweet gems embedded in underwater caves, in what we long to say,

but we don’t

dispel the frightened magenta mysteries that roam in our souls, afraid of what leads,

fleeting, fleeing connection—

Break the known trance of love, and

Chase after our loss, but

Now we’ll part, once again,

Into the cold fall streets where the lavender leaves cry and the coffee chills.