What is love?
Screw the dictionary.

Love is my dried tears on mother's lap, always there and forgotten.
Love is her brown eyes.
Love is her warm tears and their coffee-stained searchbar.
Love is us, bound to Antarctica's opposite ends.
Love is our bond: stinging, tight, and distant.
Love is melted.

Love is Scrabble with my father.
Love is the x, y, and z.
Love is my score in his heart
and his score in mine
Love is a game,
and love is the fear of losing it.

Love is a penny.
Love is the one-cent words that buy him her watered perfume
and the lucky-penny words that save him from her shattered perfume bottles.
Love is nothing,
but words make it everything.

Love is our failed jigsaw puzzles, molding right with wrong
and yes with no.
Love is crinkling one side to fit the other.
Love is a test,
and love is cheated.

Love is a boat, full and fueled, leading my wake of anger that drowns her heart and tips mine over.
Love is the leaky engine after, only sputtering the leftover words, "I'm sorry", like the last bit in a soda fountain.
Love is the claw of her words,  "I love you", yanking me back towards the woman who didn't mean them.
Love is the letter I throw in the drag of the wind.
Love is the letter that reaches her hands as I fall lifelessly and splash heavily
like a pebble:
insignificant,
never found,
sinking.
Love is her reading it:
"Love

  is

when

it

is

lost."