When I haven’t been touched in a long time, I bump into strangers on the street so I can feel their proximal phalanges wrap around my bicep and triceps in apology, and I always pay cash so I can feel the bones in the cashier’s wrist slip away from mine, like sand through the cracks of a well-made boardwalk. I sit at an angle on the subway, so I can feel my thighs rubbing against someone’s right patella. I take phone numbers from strange men so I can feel their hand pressed against my lumbar vertebrae as they talk themselves up (or in), and tell me lies about how I am the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen; I tell them it’s all in my zygomatics and let it linger so that I know what it feels like when they move their hands down to the panniculis of my abdomen. I block the aisle at Duane Reade so you have to say excuse me, and feel my gluteus maximus as you intentionally press through. I have more strange men’s contact information than I could ever use in this lifetime. I won’t call, anyway; emotional availability is about as likely as riding next to Jesus Christ on the morning train. I tell myself that I ride you not because I love your cerebral cortex, but because of carnal desire and the way my thighs feel wrapped around the iliac crests of your hips, and I’ll never get over the way your mandible brushes against my inner thighs. When it’s over, your medulla oblongata keeps your breathing in perfect time with mine, and maybe God removed a lobe from our left lungs so that you could take my breath away. I let you see the way my mitral and triscuspid valves open and close for you, and I’m prepared for the sclerosis that comes when you’ll go; and you will go, because they always go. I could never stay or be stayed with, yet you’ve peeled me like an onion, and in the same way of that complex vegetable, you will cause my orbital sockets to fill with tears that I can’t hold back. I’m so tired of building walls around my heart, because they are getting so thick and there isn’t much more room left in my chest to allow the heaviness of concrete alongside the required room for breathing without cracking my ribs, and I can’t figure out which one is more important: normal sinus rhythm or blocking myself from a pain that the strongest of opioids does not yet know how to touch.
When I haven’t been touched in a long time, I bump into strangers on the street so I can feel their proximal phalanges wrap around my bicep and triceps in apology, and I always pay cash so I can feel the bones in the cashier’s wrist slip away from mine, like sand through the cracks of a well-made boardwalk. I sit at an angle on the subway, so I can feel my thighs rubbing against someone’s right patella. I take phone numbers from strange men so I can feel their hand pressed against my lumbar vertebrae as they talk themselves up (or in), and tell me lies about how I am the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen; I tell them it’s all in my zygomatics and let it linger so that I know what it feels like when they move their hands down to the panniculis of my abdomen. I block the aisle at Duane Reade so you have to say excuse me, and feel my gluteus maximus as you intentionally press through. I have more strange men’s contact information than I could ever use in this lifetime. I won’t call, anyway; emotional availability is about as likely as riding next to Jesus Christ on the morning train. I tell myself that I ride you not because I love your cerebral cortex, but because of carnal desire and the way my thighs feel wrapped around the iliac crests of your hips, and I’ll never get over the way your mandible brushes against my inner thighs. When it’s over, your medulla oblongata keeps your breathing in perfect time with mine, and maybe God removed a lobe from our left lungs so that you could take my breath away. I let you see the way my mitral and triscuspid valves open and close for you, and I’m prepared for the sclerosis that comes when you’ll go; and you will go, because they always go. I could never stay or be stayed with, yet you’ve peeled me like an onion, and in the same way of that complex vegetable, you will cause my orbital sockets to fill with tears that I can’t hold back. I’m so tired of building walls around my heart, because they are getting so thick and there isn’t much more room left in my chest to allow the heaviness of concrete alongside the required room for breathing without cracking my ribs, and I can’t figure out which one is more important: normal sinus rhythm or blocking myself from a pain that the strongest of opioids does not yet know how to touch.
