self-portrait

Sea salt drops tickle my tongue as the night air cools my skin. I’m scared and happy and everything feels all right. At least most things feel all right. I feel Earth, stars, and sea at my fingertips. 

And certain faces make me feel too much, and sometimes it hurts and I am defeated until I am lifted from the inside into a place where the heart remembers the joy of lips on lips, cheek on cheek, eyelashes on my skin.  

In the shadows came a distant whisper of dreams flooding through a landscape of mist. Then I realized it’s the imprint of your face on my pillowcase that I miss.

These moments exist inside constellations.

and the word was

He traced her savage bow-shaped lips with his hard thumb, letting the dull red paint smear on his skin as he listened to her deep, steady breaths shift into a drawn out moan, as her body released itself from a heavy slumber and found itself awake in the black-and-white photograph that was their room. Her round, swollen eyes looked up at him and gleamed like obsidian in the gray sunlight that soaked through the chiffon curtains.

His mouth gaped, ugly like a fish, and she held on to the breath he took as if to speak, but he didn’t say a word. All she wanted were his words, not looks—words that take up space and draw distances between deceitful bodies between filthy soiled sheets. She needed his meaningless, empty words to misconstrue, to forget, to bury the memory between the pauses. But he touched her, found pleasure in the femininity of her flesh, and reminded her. She shut her eyes tightly like a child erasing a nightmare, and began to think of her flesh, of the collops clinging to her bones. He wasn’t really touching her. He was touching slices of nothing. His cold hands against her cold skin felt like nothing. She smiled, and kissed his Adam’s apple before rolling over back to sleep.

Orion

The air is getting moister. The days are hot, the afternoons humid, and nights get brisk. I can feel the sea slowly sifting through the air these days. The salt seeping into my skin, the ocean calling for one more body. The heat is sudden. There is no warning, no transition. We just know it’s coming and it’s here, like an anticipated and most welcomed visitor. It’s a fake spring though, just another summer. Everywhere you look there are cutoff muscle tees, winter-concealed tattoos put on display, sundresses and sunburnt calves. Sunrays shooting through the trees like arrows. That’s my favorite part—the trees. Oh, and the sunsets! West coast sunsets are solitary in beauty. Like a prayer, they fill the soul with a calmness and repose—a quiet vibrancy. The low sun, like a heavy orb, tucks itself away behind silhouetted mountains, as blood-drenched clouds are strewn across an indigo sky. And the heavens begin to look like a mixing board of pinks, reds, and blues, until the boisterous sun finally sinks into the sea, and a humble moon rises. The stars cascading down like a veil of slumber. Look up. Orion’s belt looks shiny and new. If you stare long enough he no longer looks like a hunter, but a dancer. A dancing hunter? No, that’s too comical. I admire him too much for that. Orion, you wandering lost soul of man, do you know that the whole world can see you?