No one ever returns from intimacy whole.
We always leave a part of ourselves
in the crux of another person’s history,
a bookend to their yesterday.
Here lies the flesh,
its youth pulled taut,
and here is the tongue which conquers it.
In my dreams, I am
a gentle noise
rolling through the countryside,
catching stories on my limbs.
I am my mother’s child
until the sound of a foreign boy
takes down an entire village.
A spark of lust
or maybe just curiosity
gone wrong.
The white of the flames so perfect
I can almost rewrite my family’s past.
His heat begins to
dissolve the tension in my chest,
erase the color
with which I was born,
so I put out his light
before it can claim me, too.
After all,
what good is a body
that is no longer a home?