She comes to me liquid and shining,
all hips and promises,
wearing the low light of a bar like perfume.
I never learned her real name,
only the nicknames I murmur
to my pillow at three a.m.
She is always colder than she looks.
Glass-kissed skin,
a bite at the lip that says come closer.
She's always the one to bridge the distance,
knowing I'm helpless for women
who take what they want without asking.
When her fingers trace patterns on my thigh,
the world comes undone.
My shoulders melt away.
My voice turns to honeyed smoke.
I become the woman I rehearse in mirrors;
laughing easier,
wanting louder,
finally fluent in myself.
She tells me I am beautiful
in a way that feels like truth,
even if it fades by morning.
She tells me I am softer than I think,
stronger than I remember,
that I don’t have to carry every sharp thing alone.
Her lies are tender.
That’s what makes them dangerous.
We dance;
me swaying, her slipping through me,
a shared body for a few bright hours.
She fits everywhere,
fills the hollows I pretend aren’t there,
presses her mouth to my doubts
until they forget how to speak.
Other women have loved me
with hands and patience and daylight,
but she devours me immediately.
Urgently.
Like she’s afraid of leaving me untouched.
By the end of the night
she is inside me completely,
and I'm already shivering at the thought of her leaving.
She never stays for sleep.
She leaves me with a ringing head,
and the ache of her laugh in my bones.
Still, I set out another glass.
Still, I wait.
Because there is something holy
about being claimed so easily,
about a woman who turns my edges smooth
and calls it intimacy.
And if loving her is a kind of slow vanishing,
so what.
I've always been a moth
to beautiful flames
that scorch me just right
when they burn out.
No comments:
Post a Comment