Mimi and Mona - Poetry: Your Fingers Map My Body

©Your Fingers Map My Body

Mimi Wolske

Mimi Wolske - Mona Arizona™

All Rights Reserved

Good God! What was I thinking

to fall for you ten seconds

after you pulled the air from my lungs?

Why do you have to be so perfect

for a female like me, late to fall in love?

Why do I have to react

as though I've been singed

each time you hold onto my hipbones

as if they were your personal guns —

"something," you said, "to hold onto

during a wild ride" —

and each time your fingers map my body

and carve surrender on my spine?

I drew articles of love on your back

in the sweat after hours of making love.

You laughed your wicked laugh

when I begged for five more minutes —

they turned into another hour.

My memory burns with the feeling

of your fingers curled in mine,

holding my hands while you kissed me.

Damn! The way you kissed me

and said I belonged to you

is like a collar around my neck

with your brand burned into it.

There we were, two empty tenements

in desire-deserted cities,

but you came into mine like a

bulldozer and you

kissed me on the lips.

It felt like an entire sentence;

I held my breath, waited

for the rest of the paragraph.

We became novels

written in our own

untranslatable language and

understood by only us two.

When you had to leave,

we became ellipses,

waiting until the next passionate

encounter with baited breath.

You possess the legend

for every inch of me.

You have charted my back,

the rise and fall of my breasts,

the curves from breasts to waist to hips.

On the scarred flesh

of my inner lip is a

rosy tattoo where you bit into it.

You know all the distances

traced by your tongue and lips

between my neck to my ribs to

where the cave is too tight to scale

without leaving the

language of your warm breath.

Neither of us is a road untraveled,

but old road maps are long

since irrelevant and places

anyone else once knew

have been unknowable since

a time before time when

we learned to chart each other.

I am mapless in your arms —

I swear it's true.

There is something wild

in you...I felt it under your

skin that very first night,

so I promise to destroy

fallen civilizations up

by their roots...you will

become feral again,

like an animal living

on top of the ruins —

but I am not ruinous.

We are both careless

cartographers —

lost in each other

but you are best at being lost.