rhyming pair of eyes. they were once installed backwards. one looked at the world, the other looked in. for a while, it was manageable. until they started arguing about what they saw. written in the same meter, they blink in couplets. close like quotation marks. open like questions you don’t want answered.

/

when they cry, the tears taste slightly different. one: salt and gasoline. the other: piano keys. irises like fossil rings. you can carbon-date a heartbreak by the way the light curls in them. one has seen god. the other has watched him rot.

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i knew you by your eyes. by the cadence. how they scanned a room like two stethoscopes listening for signs of a thump. the left one always saw faster. the right one always deeper. they made mistakes with conviction. misread weather. misplaced trust. misidentified hunger as halo.

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when you cried, i watched them fog from the inside. like two mirrors held too close to what they couldn’t name. your grief had geometry. angles that bled light. i wanted to be the thing they rested on. the small bones beneath, those shelves of tendon and muscle that ache from feeling too much.

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if love is an organ, then maybe it’s this: two eyes, rhyming their way through contradiction. searching the world for something to finally agree on.