• give me all your tenderness just for tonight

-nayyirah waheed

• “Wilde ones, let us forgive the bitter pill delivered with each finger shoved down. Forgive tasting Judas. Forgive nothing. Here is the bed, dark like a true beginning. We all enter the body alone and only once. We do not get to stay.” — “Prayer in Hell’s Kitchen” by Alex Dimitrov
• “You came to the side of the bed and sat staring at me. Then you kissed me—I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end— I drew the gown over my head; a red flush covered my face and shoulders. It will run its course, the course of fire, setting a cold coin on the forehead, between the eyes. You lay beside me; your hand moved over my face as though you had felt it also— you must have known, then, how I wanted you. We will always know that, you and I. The proof will be my body.” ― “The Encounter” by Louise Gluck
• “Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine—tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.” — “The Floating Poem, Unnumbered” by Adrienne Rich
• Science—beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone, I betray you.