Face like a road map. Pock marks like valleys and the little blue vein by your nose like a river rampantly running down through the mountain of your defined cheek bone. Face like a night sky. Freckles like one million diamonds flecked across a porcelain night sky. Two crystal clear blue eyes like full moons reflecting on an untouched lake in the middle of July. Face like a razor blade. The edges of your jaw line so straight and sharp and defined they cut through the flesh with the pointed tip of your chin. Cutting the pads of women's fingers as they trace the delicate lines leaving faint pink traces of their D-N-A. Face like a Brillo pad.  Face like a baby bear cub. Fuzzy and innocent in its nature to be nurtured in the way of the world. Like the framed moment of a woolly caterpillar being cradled by a toddler in the backyard on a fall afternoon in a pile of leaves freshly raked. Face like an anatomically correct hear. That ruptures and burst with each glance at beauty only to reanimate itself for the very idea of said beauty being some sort of purity. Some sort of saving grace. Re-iginiting in crater of eye sockets like coals that become diamonds under the pressure to cry. Face. Face like hands that hold mine firmly. Face. Like. F-A-C-E. Face like my person.


*Prompt from poem by Dorianne Laux