she says she likes to be alone
until she’s seated at a marble counter,
pitting open a grapefruit and
smiling fondly at its pinky-orange nectar,
refrigerator hum echoing
in the dimly empty house,
she welcomes the acidic trickle
seeping into her day-old papercuts,
her slurps rudely remind her that she is human
and cannot become unhinged
because bones are nothing
if not persistent  

clavicola:

It begins here. This voiceless story. The migration from my body to yours, my flesh to your own, my being to what lies between your bones. I take pen to paper like I long to take your skin in with my lips. Your marvelous canvas, that uncharted terrain — I want to trace the contours of your humanness, catch the light that falls over your hands — from the hills of your knuckles into the lope of your spine. I want, selfishly, sinfully, to recreate your primitive geology. Your shoulders. Salt dunes. Dimples like craters. Your mouth. Pollenated honeycomb. Listen — ( my skin scars easily. Even the smallest marks last years and even the smallest years have left marks. There’s a small, thin scar that runs down my cheek from when someone I loved didn’t understand that skin couldn’t withstand glass. A freckle on my lip from a childhood spent barefoot eating honeysuckles, stems-and-all. I was six when I fell on my knees and scraped a seventh chapter into my knees. ) This is what I would tell you if you wanted to read me blindly, if you wanted to run your hands over me in the dark and turn me into braille. Here, my elbow. The flesh of my thighs. The heart-shaped birthmark in a place that only you can see. Kiss me in the margins. On my lips. In the doggy-folds of my palms. There is intimacy in boundaries, in pages, in caricatures. There’s intimacy in skin being the one thing that’s keeping me from swallowing you whole, from lapping up your marrow and rattling my bones against yours until it becomes difficult to differentiate between our kidneys, our hearts, our s-shaped spines. If I could I would rip you apart just to see what lies beneath your surface. I want to see what color your blood is, what color your skin is from the inside out. It’s not enough anymore to know you. It’s not enough to hear the words ‘I love you.” It’s not enough to understand that I have you completely. I want to turn you inside out and shake out all the things that mystify me about you — I want to kiss your every organ, fall in love with your aorta, wrap myself in your intestines and die in love with your flesh. I just want to know the story behind your black lungs. Let me love you. I’ll begin here. From the nape of your neck to the small aches of your fingertips. I’ll begin here. At your skin. 

(via squeats)

cityofstone:

[You imagined you had met in another life]
You met over Soup of the Day in the campus coffee shop. 
You met in his office every Tuesday after seven, opened all the textbooks and pored over the romances of the constellations.  
You met on page 37 and quietly you pointed out the mistake: he had called it a binary star, but you knew it was love.

9.4605284 x 10¹⁵ 
Wine-sodden, you soak up the warmth of the sheets and tell him all about the religions of the stars. In the galaxies above you, you see diamond and ash. 
He explains patiently, as to a child, that the skies are not to be worshipped, only mapped, measured, calculated. 
In the morning, you wake up in his bed, light-years away from reason.  

11.2 
You ask to look up “escape velocity” in the glossary, and he doesn’t say a single word to you for the next week and a half.

03-21
The ground is thawing and you’ve been on your best behaviour for months when he takes you out on the night of the equinox.
In the parking lot, you sit on the hood of his car and listen to him lay down all the laws of your solar system:
     ”The escape velocity of the Earth is, in fact, smaller than you realize.”
     And, “Of course it takes a proper grounding in science to really appreciate the stars.”
     And also, “Your lipstick tastes of salt.” (If he had wanted a siren, he warns you, he would have plucked one out of the sea.)  
When you tell him about the whisperings you can hear in the stars, he says it’s high time he got you back home to bed.

[Diamond and ash]
Well, maybe the cosmos just doesn’t work like that.
Maybe he’ll go out to walk the dog some evening, and by the time he returns, nothing will be the same.