A red shawl smothering your shoulders. A spray of poppies clutched to your chest.

The brown hull you kicked down the trail.

A green, frantic streak in the ruined garden.

Her birdlike frame on rollerblades, plunging downhill into dusk.

Something had descended behind his eyes.

The aversion of your eyes. The thin rim of blue around the pupil's black lake.

A thing fleeing the light.

Something that obscures even itself.

What you saw streaming from her, black and brilliant as hair.

The far landscape of his face.

Your skin's furnace – wetting the sheets, eating at his body's boundary.

Flaps of bark clinging to the pine's parched trunk.

A pit full of scraps and peels. A stench emanating.

A willingness to hurtle into traffic.

The moon a red clot in the lung of the sky.

Your face, half-buried in the mattress, crammed between his spine and the wall.

A shadow thrown by the only world you know.

There were moments when you wanted something other than this love.

The way she stared past you, like a veil hung between her face and his.

Your pleading. His quiet.

Any part of you, when it mattered.

You saw it. Then you looked away.

You can beg it to let you sleep.

She was close enough to see through it.

This question has no answer.