©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.
