I fell in love with the guard on the opposite mountaintop by the way he throws a smoke signal. Just so, he fans the embers, gauges the wind. Smoke becomes sculpture up here by the scrape of cloud cover, and daily he carves me messages of love. To make me laugh, he coaxes playful dances from tendrils the color of a winter sky, flickers me sparks for ambiance. I answer with a wide puff of pure white. When ardor swells, he weaves together a rolling throb of coils and spirals. I offer in return my most expansive charcoal swirl, a seismic gyration in monochrome. When his heart is tucked into the bowl of his belly, he sends listing to the east a thick, undulating line, and it dissipates like ink in water. I can only grieve for the distance between us, these peaks and valleys, these dutiful spines, and send back to him carefully wrought smoke rings.
I long for the day the enemy comes, when my lover and I can build real fires.
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First published in Flash in the Attic, Volume 2 (2016).
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