When my grandfather tells me the tale of how he met his wife,
he says he was a mountain collecting rain. A chasm opening
to reveal birds flying from every hidden corner.
Before her palms found his own and broke open his lifelines
with every word like egg yolks, he always imagined white dandelions
to be blowing their heads off with imaginary guns
whenever their bodies collapsed and were released to the wind.
Afterward, he no longer thought of flowers dying as suicide.
Instead, he found warmth inside my grandmother’s skull,
a love so deep the darkness inside that chasm couldn’t compete.
She told him that sometimes the most healing thought
doesn’t have to do with violence itself,
but with the violence of recovery.
That’s why, when she left him ten years later,
he knew how to get over the ghost she’d left behind.