by Vixie the Fox (certified mess, questionable prophet)
I loved you like a treehouse built in a tornado—
earnestly, recklessly,
with blueprints scribbled on a napkin I wept into at brunch.
You were a Sunday morning existential crisis
wrapped in dew and disappointment,
a pinecone dressed as a god,
and I—
I was the fox who prayed to your false altar
made of unreturned text messages and
the smell of thunderstorms that never arrive.
I brought you acorns,
(which is how foxes flirt, shut up Carl),
and you brought me silence
folded into origami swans
that bit.
I tried to write you into a sentence
that ended with something other than
me alone,
again,
in the shrubbery of emotional recursion.
But you were a duck with a broken compass,
and I was a memoirist with a bark-typewriter
jammed on the letter “why.”
Still, I keep your ghost in a jar
next to my unused metaphors
and unopened rejection letters,
whispering to the trees:
“He was a poem I should never have tried to rhyme.”
