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While You Sleep

By Ainsley Drew

While you sleep, my fingers trace cursive over your shoulder-blades, high
arcs and sloping loops of defiant words. They are only meaning, no form,
the inverse of pulp and ink, they trick me in their weight, their heaviness
in my head, the cramping in my hands like an itch. They beg me to give them
life, so I trace love notes on your back while you snore.

I design whole novels across the bridge of your nose with my eyes in the
morning. An entire memoir is written inside of my cheeks when you walk out
of the kitchen carrying a mug of coffee, on your toes just slightly to
shield your heels from the cold tile. You ask me what I'm thinking and I
stutter, nothing. A blank page, the strobe of the cursor. I'm empty, but
filled with these words like a gas, shapeless, formless, but substantive.

When you call my name, I design an encyclopedia for your throat, when you
kiss me, whole libraries are inscribed inside of my skull. Each moment of
our laughter is categorized inside of my brain, characters typed staccato
across synapses, but the open word processing document glares with its
expanse of screen, seeming to scream, "Yeah, so?"

I have immortalized you in words that are memorized but dissolve once they
hit my tongue. They get clogged in my knuckles, smear across the keyboard
but never gather enough strength to press themselves out. I spend entire
days at our kitchen table waiting for the things that we've done to be
developed into language, as though I am in a darkroom with chemicals and
paper. Negatives. At the end of the day I retire next to you, across our
sheets, stretched flat like paper, and I write the words that I can't
clothe in ink or pixels. I sign my name across your ribs before I drift
off to sleep.

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