I feed my appetite with your voice. Your fricatives pirouette on my tongue. Each sibilant hangs on my teeth, then slides off and leaves its wax to pile up in my throat. I cough it up and collect it in a jar. It sits on the shelf in my basement and becomes familiar with the musty cloak of yesterday’s wet laundry. On the shelf, there are jars of swollen strawberries and gritty half-skulls of pears, blackberries like bundles of balloons. But in your jar, suspended in their own sugary liquid, are ripened vowels that arabesque when I give the jar a shake. I wipe the damp film off the metal lid with my thumb. Now I’m sitting in bed at 2:00 a.m., scooping your words from their glass house with a sticky index finger, speckled with seeds, semicolons, ellipses. Each dig gets me closer to your older, sweeter language–closer to what I’ve been craving. The last drops cling to the jar’s lip until I tilt it to mine, and I’m full-bellied, staring at an empty jar. In the bathroom, I slide a finger in my mouth until it reaches my throat and the words come up and fill the toilet and overflow onto the floor, puddle around my crooked toes and stain the linoleum.
Sometimes you have to try and explain love in weird ways. This is one way of doing just that.
