You ask me what I like about you and I’m immediately forming a grocery list of every single part of your body. I want your hair, your teeth, the curve of your mouth when you bite my back. I used to tell my mother I wanted to be torn apart by you, because Rilke once wrote that a person can be destroyed again and again until there’s nothing left to do the destroying. Mars is slowly spiraling away from us at the rate of 2 centimeters per year. Make love to me that gently.
But here’s what I’ve got, why I knew when I first saw you: you peeled oranges with your fingers and ate the peels instead of the segments. I’m burning up for your body like a cigarette and there’s no one left to inhale. I’m dying; I’m cancer and you’re my endlessly multiplying cells. The milkman left three full crates on the back porch yesterday and I drank eight bottles straight down without wincing. You make me believe in being sober again. I’ll throw away the whiskey for you. I’ll stage a seance in the backyard and light a ring of candles for every wine glass left unfilled.
Because you touch me gently, but violently when I want you to. You’re always violent when you’re tender and tender when you’re violent. Love me. God, in middle school I used to sit in that tiny desk and my heart was bursting out of my throat like a grenade and you were just sitting there, inches away from me, your back turned, your hair just touching the back of your collar, your hands, your bones, your fingers, and the teacher was always saying your name, she was endlessly saying your name, and I was always repeating it in my head with her.
We’re crosses and we’re nailing ourselves to them and letting ourselves bleed. You unzip my skin as softly as a hummingbird and unpeel me in strips like an onion, hold my bones to the light. Take your microscope and reveal every part of me. Study me, I want your eyes all over me.
Because the first time we kissed it was in a car in December and your body was cold like a morgue and I felt every dead body beneath us rock when our mouths met. I’m climbing out of every grave I ever dug for myself just to get to you. Be my Dante, my Picasso, my Jack Gilbert. Be my antidepressants. Fuck Prozac; I want you.
The first time I went to therapy the doctor recommended a daily dosage of pills but I went home and loved you instead. You’re my cure. You’re the anchor that pulls me up from under when I want to fill my pockets with stones and left myself drown. My father said he loved me more than the moon; I love you more than the moon and the earth and all the stars combined. There are 245,000,363 of them. I love you more than that.
The tectonic plates are pulling away from each other at the rate of 1 inch per year, and I’m trying to glue them back together with my bare hands so we don’t get separated. This is my excavation. This is my unearthing. Your skin, your skin. You’ve left me paralyzed without a wheelchair and I can’t move. When we’re at cocktail parties I always catch your glance across the room and you’re the only one that exists. Let’s go up to the bedroom so I can fall asleep next to you. We’re both drunk as hell. I’m addicted to you and I take it back: I don’t want to get sober.
In pottery class in college I sculpted a clay bowl and spun it on that wheel like an angel. I’m unraveling, for you. Pull me apart like a ball of yarn.
Because the two of us, together, are bulletproof. There are no weapons that will hurt us tonight.