for a purple heart
Jessica Bixel
he loved the name lydia and all the pretty girls he met were lydias
nouns with romantic blue eyes and pianist hands and honeysuckle
in their hair like lovers made of porcelain and poetry and pause
saying, in their brief dusk, the moths had looked down and seen
that the world wasn’t round or azure, but they were and death
was softer for the light in their eyes—her eyes—constellations hanging
from her lashes by thread—their lashes, really—a whole galaxy
of blinking gods with scissors and secrets knitting fate
into scarves, accessories against winter’s brief war and the breath
winter stole and froze and framed so he never got to tell
them—her, really—that he was in love with the way she smelled
like classic mythology and moths right before they died