I Taste You Much Better

Huanhuan Wang

I pass forth to your tongue—from my own tongue—a secret message in a spire. Rooms abundant, but still, for your choosing. I ache all over like an anaphylactic bound to an anthill. My skin undone from muscle and undulating at sixty-two beats per minute.

Fear is the edge upon which I stand tallest, for it cannot ever surmount me. And if I came to this earth from a distant star, then certainly it was to siphon the world of all the horrors it could offer. To find my agent blue and pass scripture through a keyhole.

Squeeze. Squeeze tighter. Shrink your body into mine—I’ll do the same until it is unclear whose body we are in. What I’ve learned written in adenine and cytosine. My teeth are falling out all over the place, and you’re taking me by the hand through Winter. Resist the urge to lose the plot. I gamble we will make it this time.

Pink smudges from a dusk sky, on your fingers or mine. Whose tongue were we being? …I almost let it go. A heart skips eight times in two breaths. Bone against bone, land that opens and vacillates. Cadency fed anchors worth unwinding in the water. Don’t mix botanicals for berry chalices.

It will seem hard at first, but it will be Mercury, and it will teach you that madness is truth and veracity is freedom. Deep inside inverted hydrogen, unreflecting and blunt. Basin and Range roadsides—lost and hyperarid. It’s all the same. It’s all not.

Can’t you taste it on me?

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