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. not identical, but 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. together, they write verses across the cheekbones. pupils like trapdoors. irises like fossil rings. you can carbon-date a heartbreak by the way the light curls in them. one has seen god. the other watched him rot.

/

i knew you by your eyes. not the color, but the cadence. how they scanned a room like two stethoscopes listening for signs of softness. they were not twins, just lovers denied intimacy. the left one always saw faster. the right one, deeper. they made mistakes with conviction. misread weather. misplaced trust. misidentified hunger as halo.

/

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. not just eyelids, but the small bones beneath, those shelves of tendon and muscle. that ache from feeling too much.

/

if love is an organ, then maybe it’s this: two eyes, rhyming their way through contradiction. searching the world for something to agree on. when you slept, they didn't. they dreamed separately, but somehow always woke up in the same sentence, lingered at the ame metaphor. i wanted to be what they closed for.

-a final image they’d hold even after the lids went down.