bibliophile
by lena

who can read skin?
who can make love to someone and feel what they are thinking?
other fleshes are languages I cannot read
because in my mind is a novel I cannot put down
pages tear at me like fingernails down my back,
down my forgettable back,
my skintone a language perhaps spoken but never written down
gathering an eternity of dust on tongues rotting and buried beneath
the sands of some foreign soil, on some foreign skin
no one will write poetry on the lunulae of my fingernails;
there is no magic in the outer curve of my ear
the shape of my hips, that fragile hollow concave,
does not have the capacity to hold the secrets of the pyramids
DaVinci wrote Mona Lisa’s language on her lips, infernal words
wrapped around one mysterious smile,
two infernal lips
my own could never baffle historians; even if they
speak too much, no one listens