This Place

by April Salzano

You ask how much I want you. With a consistency            
that tears at my skin, centrifugal spin                      
to my core. I want your touch on my body my mind
your breath in my mouth, open,
quiet. I belong to you already. I remain still,          
uneasy, unsettled. How often can I
touch you before you vanish like light edging
at the blinds, before the sullen fog of morning reaches      
in to take you back, leaving me wet from your tongue,
drunk from your smell, tracing my way back to my own
reality, a place I barely recognize.

Ask me tomorrow. Ask me a year from now. Ask me
to describe how it feels once I’ve gotten
what I wanted, taken what wasn’t mine.
Ask me then when you know my fear of failure
overrides my stubborn refusal to relent. Ask me when
we’ve finished consuming each other, breaking silences into
sound, heroically battling each other’s ghosts
back down where they came from. Ask me

when we’ve finished memorizing
our respective lines, scars, the place
I twice tore open and was sewn back together,
the eyes inked into your weathered skin, watching
me watch you. Ask me when
the engine has finished killing the track. I cannot
define my reasons while I am still
carrying you around, a half formed idea, something
I created on my own. I cannot

reach you where you are. I am again consuming
leftovers, half eaten ghost rations, discarded.
And I am tired. I have already waited through this season
in another life, its weather blowing a restless black wind,
its sun scalding my skin, which I would sooner crawl
out of than be this untouched. I have been here before

crouched in a dark hole waiting to be found. Waiting through
the words of a language
I do not know, a dialect I never learned, cannot
translate or articulate, whose words promise to bring you here,      
to make you rush headlong to where
I exist, waiting.
Waiting for you to come,
not back, but forward, to this place you have never been.
This place is who I am. I am this place.
It is where I will be, waiting.  In spite of myself.
I am inside this place and I do not
            know how to
                                    find my way back out.