murder

cross-legged between tilted stones, names half-sunk in the patient earth, a lighter’s spark briefly rivaling the stars.

smoke curled upward as a quiet offering, braiding itself with the dusk.

then the crows came— a parliament of black wings— circling, circling, the sky a thought they couldn’t finish.

each pass was a soft thunder, feathers stitching shadows over our faces, their cries sharp enough to nick the silence.

we laughed. not because it was funny, but because we were alive and the air was in our lungs and the dead beneath us had already spent theirs.

crows can remember faces— hold them in the dark archive of their bright minds, carry them for years.

I wondered what they saw when they looked down at ours: figures exhaling ghosts, laughing softly among the dead.

two brief heat signatures

among the long-cooled names.

Would they know us tomorrow?

Would they warn their kin?

the smoke drifted, thinned, disappeared. The crows looped again, tireless. Around and around they flew

like days, like grief, like joy

returning in new feathers.

to be alive is to be seen.

a friend, a bird, the air itself.

not for the hush of what’s finished.

not for the dates etched in stone.

for the brief warmth of our shared breath in the cold, the faces we turn toward the sky, the way we rise, again and again, into the flare of the night.