your face blooms, open
and I swallow the feeling from my joints
down to my stomach
to spill and spread,
or cling there, between my bones.

there is a hollow in your chest,
where your ribs split beneath flesh and the hair that spills like oil across it -
and you are open here.
eyelashes and nose and tongue
buried between your bones
and calm with knowing where you are.

Take away the skin between us,
like peach skin, bitten and ripped away
so that I can feel the fingers that build your hands
pulling at me –
so that my bruises are your fingertips.

my lungs will move, fast and graceless
by your side,
lifting to themselves the air you press
from the empty shell of your nose
to my shoulder – to my throat.

and at last, here are our eyes,
yours lie, swaddled in their lids and moving over the limbs we still hold
like they have broken away.

and here are mine
sleeping open
and drinking like gills
the sight of you.