I learned young that hunger doesn't wait
for permission.

Ravens do not blush over what feeds them.
They glide into the field where something has already given way—
fur slicked flat by rain,
the opened seam of a ribcage,
the soft fact of something that used to be able to run.

They do not ask how it got there.
They lower their heads
and enter.

I have loved like that.

You were already split down the middle when I discovered you—
voice worn thin at the edges,
your laugh still wet with someone else's name.

I tilted my head,
chirped when you offered me the glitter-worn trinket of yourself.

Hunger is not delicate.
It is a shine along the throat.
It is the soft sound of entry.

Ravens collect what glints.
Foil, bones, shard, a button,
the way you press your tongue to your canines when you're thinking,
the way you held a cigarette like it was thinking for you.

I tried on your posture like a coat still warm from your body.
I needed to know—did I want your mouth
or did I want to be it?

There is a point where mimicry stops being performance
and becomes muscle.
Where the voice you've rehearsed slicks your own vocal cords
until it is the only way you know
how to speak.

I do not circle politely.
I descend
upon this meadow of silk and you,
you, you.

Here the air tastes like pennies,
iron and heat and sharp
like your nails digging into my back,
like your fingers tugging at the roots of my hair.

Feathers damp with your gutter-water,
black gone green in the right light,
I enter the bright cavity
plunder something small and twinkling and call it love.

If I want your mouth it is because I want to feel how it moves from the inside.
If I want to be you it is only because I know how to take.

The raven cannot decide between devotion and dissolution.
I do not love halfway.

I orbit. I glean. I devour.

I open my beak
and your name falls out.

Let's play a game of who can be quietest (you win).
Blindly koi-dancing centimeters apart without a clue
I'm not touching you. The fire of a million suns in our
coeur and it's a different planet down here, weightless
hovering above whalesong-haunted urchin barrens but
I can't point out to you all the sunken treasures
of bioluminescent stars
because the people
up where
the people
are insist that
we're in hate.
All the legion little voices within me under noise discipline,
keeping my secrets, couple quietly in hot drawn-curtain
bunks to stifle their moans, sweaty as peach slices canned
in their own syrup. How like sea snails slipping from their
shells we'll slither across each other's tongues and worship
at the pillars of temples drowned below the waves.

How flat is the surface world compared to our deepness. I'm
following you
off the edge
of the map
to sail across a sea of comets and cold fields
of sunflower starfish. We're self-contained and -sufficient
vulnerable
only to rust
and lust.
Sounding you out, reaching crush depth. Saturn is lighter than
the liquid in which our organs swim. Contact!
Buoyant heart surfaces
past my lips.
Come up for air.
Salt spray, nautical knot, able-bodied and Hello, sailor
Let's play another game: what's hard long and full of (you win!)