I felt cramps in my stomach
when she looked at a pot of geraniums
and said, “Maybe I am in your past” –
or were they butterflies stirring in their chrysalises?
Nothing is as universal as pain.

I need to put myself in quotation marks –
quotation marks like tears.
They are not alarming signals –
sad sadness, indirect.

“The feeling is as cold and sweet
as the songs of birds lunging upward
through the guarded air, arrows splitting
the dawn of anguish into white and blue.”

It is a timely miracle,
when I remembered you looking into my mind –
planted in the roiled soil, wanting rain and breaks –
and forgot that I had lost it.

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 Julian Lovelace lives in Dublin. Their work has appeared or is upcoming in CERASUS, Icarus, and several other zines. They’re drawn to strange visions.