a writer’s body
February 27, 2011
Sun arrives and leaves, filling itself, emptying. Sustenance of your leaning into me, limbs holding, lips touching my neck, tasting through smell. Light filtered by window glass. Pouring coffee into cups, silence I know to keep for awhile, pens moving, keyboard letters tapping into pages of novels, essays, poems from memory to be inscribed upon history. Our conversation.
If my eyes linger on you, you will pause — so I take small glances while you are distracted, productively taken by your inner world. Once the second cup’s been drunk, I’ll read this to you. Show myself naked to you, when you become mine again.
A writer’s body hides the coursing of blood through muscles taut from storying, placing, shifting, exchanging words. Fingers sculpt sound and meaning, wheels of energy turning at ten levels of thought and action. Generativity of the flesh, synapses traveling through labyrinth of brain and spine, moving in the stillness of a stenographer’s posture. Revealing nothing but the act of documentation, the images drawn in paper and ink, each letter a brick stacked toward completion.
Breakfast dishes cleared, I close my laptop and rise to shower. Leave the bathroom door halfway ajar, enter the scalding spray that strikes me between shoulder blades. Hand against white tile wall, hair sliding down my skin and into the mesh covering the drain. Ringlet strands of black protein my scalp releases as I drag my claws through the multitudes, shampooing. Double helix of genetic knowledge, its melanic tint a bloody copper. Fumes from soap handmade with orange juice, shea butter, and turmeric fill the bathroom, making a pungent steam sauna of my morning ablutions. I wash myself, thinking of your hands at the breakfast table, playing at imagined remembrances, sequencing moments into poetic flow for publication.
There is a rustling, the door of dark glass separating me from you opens. One leg, then the other steps inside the vapor cloud around me, inhaling spice and steam. I turn to you, bright apricot skin showing and hidden in parts by cresting water drops and their visible heat. Eyes and arms reaching, you pull me gently to you. Stomachs meet. Palms squeeze my hips, fingers stretch apart to contain me, claim me; digits no longer curled to keyboard silent words twist my raven locks. Oxygen and sugar pulsing between the chambers of your heart against my throat. Loud, insistent. Masculine.
© 2011 Tahminah Zaman
