The Santa Ana Literary Association will be presenting a new poem by a local poet every week this year. This week’s poem is “My love” (“The Eye on the Other Side) by David Layden.

My Love

By: David Layden

My love told me slowly
with
short,
quick breaths
of how the world was ending
and
that she didn’t love me anymore.

Her lips were a pale pink, and her eyes light hazel, the color of sky in my world.

“These days are gigantic,”
she told me
with small, trembling lips.

She told me this with arms outstretched, as if embracing an unknown future. One that I knew I had no part of.

“These realizations smother me,”
she said
as she moved closer.

And in one hot bittersweet breath she told me “goodbye,” just like that, “goodbye,” not two words, but one. One blue word.

And then
she kissed me
with cold, dead lips.

David Layden was a lifelong resident of Santa Ana. He started writing poetry in high school, and went on to earn a Master’s in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. In the words of J. Martin Strangeweather: “David was one of my oldest friends. We met in third grade. I drank my first beer with him, not in third grade, of course. David wasn’t simply a poet—he was one of those rare souls who was poetry itself, the living, breathing word in all of its raw beauty and anguish. Try and imagine a gentle thunderstorm, that was David. As is often remarked about those who live their life unedited, he was taken from this world too soon.”