#pillow marks

I don’t know where we were or what for or if it mattered, or not. There were patterns drawn across your face from where the pillows kissed you in the night and your cheeks matched the duvet. It looked kind of cute. I wondered if I could ever kiss you as well as the pillows do. Possibly not. I was jealous because all the lines I painted across your face faded in the morning light. I used my lips as a palette and the tip of my tongue as a paintbrush. Your skin was the canvas, your bones the easel. I rolled saliva around my mouth like cement in a cement mixer, but I still couldn’t get it to stick to you. I’m sorry I’m not an artist. The evening before I made love to you for the first time, my mother told me that to love eternally requires a set of knives. Each night, she carves out certain vessels and valves to serve to my father on a platter. I admired that, though never believed it. For my 12th birthday Dad gave me his pocket knife, but I’ve never used it. More or less I always thought of love as nothing more or less than art. I’m sorry I’m not an artist (anymore). I’m spinning his pocket knife around in my palm. I want to carve your name into maple trees and build spider webs from the sap and catch the all mosquitoes that mutate our love into a disease. I finally know what my father meant when he said love was about hunting, but I’m not sure if even he knew whether or not we’re the hunters or the hunted: the artist or the canvas. Last night I tried to paint your face with love, but it washed off before you woke up. (I’m sorry I’m not an artist). There are still pillow marks cut into your face and I’ve spent all morning trying to join the red-brick streets and avenues paved across your suburban, sunburnt skin. I reached a dead end behind your left ear, where it’s foggy and the street light has been flickering for weeks. You’re still sleepy; the sunlight clamping your eyes shut with ultraviolet nails. Asleep on me, I knead my knees into the shape of a pillow in the hopes that when you wake part of me will be grafted into you. For love is not art; a lover not an artist, but a hunter hunting the hunted.