Where my words give lie to the wolf under the skin.
You are not lost amongst dark angels; the pillars of light you dance around are not meant to illuminate.
But burn.
We all have strings. From wrist to wrist, from throat to throat. Tying us to our secrets, our hungers, our friends, our family.
Yours are not mere strings; you have wrapped yourself in barbed wire.
“Why are you waiting for the thunderstorms?” she asked.
How could I not? I answered.
Because the moments before a thunderstorm are a precipice where the whole world holds its breath.
Because when it comes, it comes with a torrent of rain. It doesn’t tap at the windows, it knocks hard enough to make music.
Because the space between the lightning and thunder is where god would exist, and the thunder itself is the moment before fear, the moment of fear, and the moment after fear, all rolled into one glorious sound.
Because it is Noah’s flood. Because It is purifying and terrifying and beautiful in the way only terrible and great things can be.
almost. kissed
you made it seem like an inevitable
accident.
a trick on fate
almost. spoken
somewhere between magic
and stuttering photographs
trying so hard to create space
where it shouldn’t be.
almost. sweet
the way you read to sleep.
more real, I think
then anything else you’d said
almost. shared
a phrase or passage
for a moment
the best kind of neighbors
almost. enough
What happens when you stop feeding a wolf?
It gets more cunning, perversely more patient.
And hungrier.
Room by room, I have built a house.
In one room I have placed specific touchstones of memory.
Smooth stone, an invitation.
I recall a kiss in a bathroom stall; she had excused herself from her table where she sat with her friends. I caught her, and it was just a single kiss, a single hungry kiss, but it stayed with me for hours. From the first, I remember her eyes dancing for me.
Another touchstone, another memory.
I remember a thigh, found under a bridesmaid’s dress. She was well past tipsy before I took her to dinner, and on the drive home I slid my hand under the blue of her dress. We kissed in front of the house she was staying at, and we may have kissed before, but this was the kiss I remember. The warmth of her lips, how easy it all was.
Another touchstone, another memory.
A girl with dusky skin leaning over my desk. Her hips moved, an invitation, and I remember tasting her. She never stopped moving, not when my hands pressed along the back of her thighs to guide her closer, not when I threw her back against my leather chair, not when her hands became buried in my hair.
Another touchstone, another memory.
Wherever she went, so went the bells.
In bracelets wound around her ankle; woven into hair as silver tresses; placed around her neck as pendant and charm.
But I never heard them ring.
Not even in passing.
Her wrist was a bridge,
b’tween wiles and wild
her eyes were a dusky door
of her throat, I once wrote, but can’t easily quote
and now I write her no more.
An upended carafe of courage and a view from the floor.
I counted each drip, caught the last with my eyes closed.
It’s true.
You can dance between rain spots.
You can hide amid the rushes.
You can laugh at the riches.
And spilled milk is neither spoiled nor spent.
The front door behind her.
Wrists over her head.
And there was laughter in her eyes.
Three words, four maybe, and I drew her into the dining room, lifting her onto the round oak table that dominated the space.
It was lunch break at the school down the street and we had only fifteen minutes before she had to be back and teaching again.
I unsnapped her jeans: hips, thighs, legs, off. A pink thong, left in place, legs over shoulders and I lightly bit the inside of her thigh. Her fingers gripped my shoulders, then hair, tangling, and I pressed my advantage, making a feast of her while I gripped her ass and drew her closer to the edge of the table for the leverage needed to devour.
She shuddered to a climax.
Her smile caught me and then she was off the table and on her knees, unsnapping my jeans and taking me into her mouth. I didn’t last long – we didn’t have long – and her eyes never left mine even as my fingers clenched in the back of her hair.
Moments later she was back in her car, and on her back to school. And I was counting the small marks on my shoulders her fingernails had left behind.
You were the wrist before the hand.
The bite before the surrender.
And I was yours the moment you realized not every path could be seen with your eyes open.
I caught it in your smile or the red in your shirt and the way you almost blushed when I told you how your eyes made envious the diamonds in my pocket.
(later, I traded the diamonds for an apricot, and the apricot for some seeds: one for wickedness. one for bittersweet fruit with tiny plum stones for souls. and one, of course, for what follows – a seed for a smile, the cleverest kind)
We always reap what we sow, and we sow discord and laughter.