I am the verse that takes your name, no, not just the name, but the thing-itself. I am the word that confesses the wild pain of longing, that unnamable animal breathing in the dark. To love is to displace the soul; it is to inhabit a house that does not belong to us, a terrifying and holy eviction.

When our discussions lose their way in the imperfect past, I seek the future-more-than-perfect, that tense where we finally deserve to exist. You laugh softly, and I draw your mouth with my tongue, a slow calligraphy of the skin. I respect your periods and commas, the gasps where you stop being you and start being the air I breathe. I date our reticences, those silences that weigh more than speech.

I lengthen my lashes against your back, hanging your tiredness upon my shoulders like a heavy, golden shroud. I want to wander your chest and die in that shelter, for dying is the only way to truly see. Your skin is my refuge; your absence, a shipwreck in a cup of water.

What is this love that does not wish to be slaughtered and reborn as poetry? What loneliness does not wish to trade its tired bohemia for the raw pulse of the present? I want to trace your desires with my fingertips and erase old manuscripts with the cruelty of my laughter.

Passion is a maelstrom of matter. Your life is my story, but written in a language I am still learning to speak. The sacred testimony of your bare skin skirts my anxiety, curves and wills held fast in the trap of a kiss. I open my smile as one opens a window to the abyss. I bless you with the salt of my saliva. We are, finally, the fullness of a thing that cannot be explained.

©️Beatriz Esmer