--THIS MORNING I OPENED MY EYES IN WONDER

                                             Sign Language

She kisses me like she has a death wish.  As if happy endings are only meant for suckers.

The room flips upside down with a titanic thud.  The ceiling might be caving in, or on fire. 

Still, she’s not through kissing me.

She signs “More” into my palm. 

On my neck, she signs, “Don’t you want something for nothing?” 

In the space between two of my ribs, she signs, “Don’t you want to suffer gladly?”

Her tongue is a hot book, washing my teeth with sonnets and stories containing car crash scenes.  She steals my air, holds it hostage, then ladles it back to me a Soup du jour of Pennyroyal mint.

The carpet beneath me shimmies, fibers statically clinging to my earlobes.  My toes turn into firecrackers and explode in unison.

Now her tongue is a cheetah, with the world’s longest tail, playing my tonsil bell like a metronome.  She rattles her teeth over mine like a muffled game of Kick the Can.

I go dizzy and light, a human tumbleweed, but then I’m back, my mouth still superglued to hers.

When she twists, a flock of starlings bursts out of her tangled hair, releasing a mango scent in the air.  Pastel pink sweat dribbles off her forehead and runs down my cheek as if she’s etching her initials into my skin with viscous cotton candy.

I haven’t used since I started NA, where we met, and I’m certain she hasn’t either, but this all feels like drugs, making my bones shatter and recuse themselves.

In a circle around my navel, she signs, “It was love at first sight for me.  Like falling hard for a stalagmite, or a house on fire.”

Her mouth is a vacuum, a cavern, the Louvre, a night in Tuscany picking olives near a hillside villa.  Her mouth is Brett Easton Ellis, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Barret Browning and Bukowski on the brink of a bender.

I sign, “Isn’t it possible that we could die like this?”

With our mouths still under construction, she undoes my pants, and on my erection signs, “Why do you think I’m working so hard?”

Nervously, I sign, “So, this is like a what-a-way-to-go kind of thing?”

She melts my eyeballs with her rollercoaster tongue, then signs back, along my swollen testicles, “No one’s going quite yet.  First, I need to cum.”