What the Fireflies Knew

Poems as fiction-

I.

The forest held its breath before the storm,

and I sat small beneath the towering pines,

my coffee growing cold between my palms

like all the conversations I never had.

Lightning wrote its anger across the sky

in a language I was just learning to read—

the grammar of solitude, the syntax of regret,

the punctuation of chances missed.

II.

The fireflies rose from…