play, pause, replay

once upon a red stream

No one ever talks about the red stream

between holding on and letting go.

Atlas once wrote about etching my initials

on his heart and laying it bare in the sun.

He would play the piano by the window, his

off-key song falling around like in yellow spots.

The day they buried Daisy six feet under the

stinky soil of my heart, Atlas dug it further

to plant another cherry seed on it.

We used to sit under the shade of Grandad's

cherry tree and sing the little 'ole song.

Our lips would be stained red in clumsy 

upper-lip kisses; our mid-afternoon dreams

would drown in the blues of the summer sky.

Atlas traced heart shapes on my upper thigh

every day before I fell asleep against his chest.

Sometimes, he'd write to the nameless 

strangers at his window, humming our song.

He once wished to burn the walls and paint them

in our slender silhouettes—kissing on the tower.

Sometimes I can hear the clock ticking loudly

against my ears, making me want to die.

Atlas moved out last November to Vegas.

Our city still smells like sunflowers in the morning.

The afternoon settles in red stains on the marble.

He was the only difference in the shades against

the bleak blues of late November evenings.

The half-burnt cigars, the old broken stilettos,

the cheap cold wine, the mascara-stained tissues.

The paper flowers never bloomed, so I waited.

Atlas is in love with someone else; someone 

way better and prettier than me.

I think she has long brown hair and green eyes.

And it hurts to watch the slow death of what we had,

like watching a car crash in slow motion,

and I'm the one behind the wheel, but I can't stop it.

Yet it's easier to see him from afar and still love him,

realizing love was just another laser quest.

He later asked me to write to him, maybe call him

someday, and so I mailed him the last letter, 

carefully treasured with a purple lipstick stain.

Our evenings now settle behind the trees, in the

dark edges of our tainted tattoos. Every beautiful 

thing makes me think of you, dream of you.

I still dream of meeting you at the bus stop again,

and falling in love with you; our paper flowers

would bloom against the mourning green of our

slender silhouettes, making it so unreal against the light.

But I hope we'll never meet again, because it's

easier like this, with you tattooed along the crack of

my heart, and me, burned with my last letter to you.

No one wondered about the red stream flooding last

 monsoon; it was just another fucking everyday disaster.