Exquisite Corpse

You don't know that you're in love with me until after the operation. Even then, it takes a while: coming around from the anesthesia, you alternate between calling me a gorilla-woman and a whore, but I know you don't mean it. It isn't until after that scallop-pink skin starts to stretch back over the wound and my kidney starts to settle into your guts that you start to realize it. 

So I ask you to do me a favor. You don't know that I'm holding the knife, but when I hear you say Anything, when I see the way you look at that severed finger, then at me, than back at that finger, I can tell you understand. 

It's your idea to bribe the doctor. It's your idea to trade all of our fingerprints next, then entire hands, until people double-take when they see the mismatched stalks of us growing from our shirt sleeves. By the end of the year, we're brushing each other's teeth in the bathroom mirror, glancing one another's eyelashes over our still-respective cheeks, touching one another in the dark and in the day and always, always. By the time we switch tongues, we don't care that we'll never taste again, that our mouths will probably never root these foreign muscles down and we'll never get to say each other's names. That first kiss is too exquisite to pronounce anyways. We'll carry notebooks or get Stephen Hawking machines, learn how Mimes say I love you.

Photo by Roman Singer.