On hour four of our five hour drive home, there is nothing more that we want to listen to beyond breathing, the hum of the road. I recline my seat completely, loose the zipper of my party dress and curl there under my winter coat.
You start at my neck where spine gives way to scalp, fingers and nails unraveling my hastily dressed hair and my nerves. My shoulders are clay; your prints someday will be prehistoric, a history I will read in photographs when I am too wrinkled to see. I think this must be why you take pictures of me when I am undressed, so that we will both remember.
The knobs of my back are neither piano keys, guitar strings, nor the glossy depressions of brass instruments. I am more like a dinosaur who has lost her plates, who lathers daily in foaming soaps and sweet lotions to keep from showing my reptilian nature. I am dry and I hold my tongue behind my teeth not because it is forked, but because it is more like a club than an organ for chatter, pleasure, or song.
You touch me anyway where my dress falls open down my back, a silk skin I am shedding; you abandon the limits of this aperture for a hand up my skirt. I open my eyes and through the window I look beyond my own smoky reflection to the night sky, and when you put your fingers in me I see in every constellation a vessel I must fill.
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