I have never felt traditionally “beautiful” at any age, not from linear
memory, but when you slid your hands under my dress, up my thighs,
resting at the cotton hem line of my underwear. It was different. I felt my
legs fall forward, locking at the knee with nervous, humming energy.
I was no longer invisible; smeared and pressed across cracks to hold things
together. I was seen, hungered after and savoured. By the tips of your gentle fingers,
by your ears leaning forward to listen for forgotten trauma, by your mind—wide,
critical thought in cycling tandem splashing through cloudy puddles. We laid on your
mattress under early light, breast to breast, your mane of moving midnight skimming
my arms, tickling my cheeks. I tried controlling the trajectory, command the river
current, but I sleep so soundly against the slack of your spine. No outward
adventure has captivated my naked eye or left me in the soil you found me in: mixed-
race vine, the lilt of our tongues, reading each other’s history with soft hands planting
kiss after kiss on dark creases, under the roving eye of the moon. This memory,
lover— rinses my limbs to the ends of my hair,
after a day, another cold dollar, thinking about you eight times— has deepened
like a strong tea.
My hips, cresting dolphin, rises to meet yours, backlit familiarity across peculiar
prettiness, out-run by falling to our core and striking up a home in this fragility. In
a time you could cough yourself to death, I take the memory with me to work,
place it carefully on my desk, sanitizing it, setting it firmly under a blot of sun
because the cold dollar cannot immortalise my memory.
But you—in morning silken kimono—keep it above our door, a garland of
flowers to ward off evil, reminding me life is exactly what we make it:

slippering across the kitchen, breaking into light and heat to keep your
coffee warm.

“In a time you could cough yourself to death” appears in DUM DUM Zine Issue 7: Quar + Time which is available to read online here.