the fucking rules.
i.
you must consent to be depicted in the iridescent limelight of my memory; this is the first rule of fucking me. when you have left my bed and i have lost your number, when you have closed your eyes and i have oiled the hinges on my heart, when there is nothing left between us but the laconic legacy of shared touch, you will lift your head behind my eyelids in the aftermath of a borrowed dream. you will smile on someone else’s face, catch my gaze through the fluttering curtain of another’s lashes, and i will recall the way your hands cupped my hips like so much water; i will look at what we were and cast it in a dozen roles, the curve of your shoulders, the cant of your breath. you will find yourself in a poem i’ll write, the small strip of alabaster that appeared when you pressed the roundest part of your nail to the softest part of my breast, and have no way to know
i am talking about you.
ii.
you must be fluent and practiced in the language of refusal; this is the second rule of fucking me. i may whisper no into your skin like a prophecy and you may utter it with nothing but the faint rustle of your hands sliding into the pockets of your thrift-store jeans, but i will hear you, lover, and i will demand to be heard. you will not claim to know nothing of the sibilants that go spoken and unspoken, that carve themselves when unheeded in aftermath’s bitter revenge, for you have had ample opportunity to pick them up. in line at the all-night grocery and in the poorly lit corner of a moth-eaten college bar, you have heard no and no has heard you; if you must lie, must consider yourself beyond this, leave me and acquaint yourself with a word that is not fucking. i am not a rosetta stone. you are not the good will hunting
of coitus.
iii.
you must learn to sheath your tongue before it is used for falsehoods; this is the third rule of fucking me. if the way my hair shone in the fading red embers of a burned-out sunoco sign stilled the breath in your lungs, if the pinked skin you have bruised with kisses on the inside of my thighs brings you to raptures, if my tossed-akimbo limbs against the worn-thin plaid of your second-best sheets is too much for you to bear, tell me once, twice, a dozen times—i am not your censor, and i have long since known i am beautiful. but i do not widen my mouth to wrap around parts of you purpled with hunger, do not dip my tongue between the salted plains of your most cherished lands, to hear affirmations you do not mean tumble from between your twice-bitten lips. i do not spread my legs to you for anything less than the truth of our rough-hewn bodies, the breath i will borrow and borrow from your overwrought lungs, and i do not need your niceties. i do not need your choked off speech unless
you cannot bear to keep it silent.
iv.
you must not promise that you will never leave me; this is the fourth rule of fucking me. even if ours is a timeless love story, blossoming out from these spit-slick firsts into a romance that spans our lives with graceless abandon, curling as ivy vines around the home that sits empty now inside my chest, someday you will leave. it does not matter if it is you or i who walks out the door, if it is the morning after or a dozen mornings after, if it is done in jagged words or aging remembrances. in histories that shatter like tossed champagne flutes against the granite floor of the people we once were, in a thousand little deaths or the final, inescapable one: someday, you will leave. this is the truth of any story, love or otherwise, and we are too old to hitch our patchwork-painted wagon to unhappened futures, to press our unlimited selves into such an unworthy vessel; it must be enough, you and i and the way the air grows thick between us, shimmering with heat so visible we might as well be
a highway after a summer rain.
v.
you must not call it making love; this is the final rule of fucking me. love cannot be made from the grunts and folds of sweat-slicked bodies any more than fruit can be borne simply by caressing the bark of the gnarled old apple tree you kissed me beneath, just once. perhaps ours is be a love story; perhaps you will speak to me in only inescapable truths; perhaps you will rest your fluency in the language of refusal against the stretched-tight skin between my breasts, heard and hearing. the iridescent limelight of my memory may paint you as many people just as yours may cast me in a dozen shades of someone else, but for all the attempts in all the world you cannot make love from fucking. press yourself inside of me, lover, open your eyes and your lips and your legs, let me think of you in the faded red glow of the burned-out sunoco sign, allow the slide of my tongue against that thin strip of alabaster and together we can write
the rules of making love.
