you say, & with your palm warm between my thighs, I think of how
much has already stolen into our mouths.
My teeth hum with the memory of it—feathers,
flight. The stone
in my throat like an egg cast from its nest.
Day after day, I must learn to swallow what isn’t mine.
I could say you hold me
down the same way the stars pin their grief into place,
but no, you are nothing
like the night, molding instead my body to the refuge of yours as though
I were snow
breaking open to accept the embrace of a boot.
How long, this falling? How remote?
Before the baptism against your tongue’s warm glove,
let me revel
in the glory I have yet to quench: my skin
a testament. Its slow spill of lust hammered into something holy. & gilded.
You have starved us into an escape I cannot become.
No, you won’t survive
the storm of me,
the flood, the surge, the brief fire roused between horizons.
& yes, I will smother
under the lesson of you, a lesson my lips must predict again & again,
because never
am I so full
as when I am full of my own emptiness.