She has written and rewritten their story. What if it had started this way? Or that way? How will this end? Every time she looks at her she is reminded of a poem she once read. That couplet of oneself and oneself your love will write. Some days she can’t pinpoint why it reminds her of them, and others she can. Other days she sees how falling in love has created individuals tangled together in a haze of pain and joy and wonder.
She is impatient – she wants to tell her, love her, make love to her. She wants to see the moon dance across her stomach, wants to see the night change them into different women, but refuses to push. No pressure, for fear of loss, for fear of never seeing the fattened silver torso of the moon on her breast.
When the words come spilling out of red lips and wrapping around her like the bodice of the black dress her love is wearing, she is weightless. She scoops her smile into her stomach, and she changes her world. They are a couplet of love, the silver torso of the moon, weightless with every possible bit of light.
She traces words on skin in the moonlight: enigma, character, story, romance, you, me. She wants to write prose on her epidermis, use it as a typewriter for the story of them. She finds every inch of her engaging, watches her body tense and pull as alabaster fingers trace olive skin. The way their bodies tangle together in slumber is poetry. That couplet of oneself and oneself.
Melissa Boles is a writer, storyteller, and impatient optimist from the Pacific Northwest who recently relocated to Tennessee. Her writing focuses on art, mental health, love, and the human connection. Melissa has been published in The Daily Drunk, Emerge Literary Journal, Stone of Madness Press, and at Fanfare and Sexology on Medium. Her debut chapbook, We Love in Small Places, will be released via ELJ Editions in May 2021. You can find her at http://MelissaBoles.org or at @melloftheball.
Emerge Literary Journal 