post-post-pleasure

(cw: chronic illness)

there’s ants crawling round where she ate my neck–

rock candy mountain where the other friend kissed and sucked for blood.

on the grass that June, I’m perfuming. splitting open to ooze in the sun, skin

taut and glossed like the ant’s backside–skin stomach sighing with the

pores of the earth, ripe with dirt. this is how a tongue is supposed to feel.

skin now sweating in my 10 year rotation, tiny legs of heat

marching, hiding through my body, poisoning my organs,

they tell me. lying in my sick bed, I am still in that field.

sweetness on tongue turned black-cherry sickly, mush of peach and grand roots

of birch tree trying to grow tall. the curtains are white and I

sit still. I make the calls and check the lists and how long could it be until

my skin–ripe with hot angry nectar–is touched, ripped open again,

not for story nor hunger nor hatred,

but simply for taste?

___

VIOLETA WOOLYWISP JOY (she/her) is a writer and visual artist making work of body, grief, earth, and ether. She is proud to write of her experience living with chronic illness and pain. Her most recent writing can be found in Ghost Girls Zine Issue 3: Grief, and in Spell Jar Press's Moon Water Anthology. She is somewhere, finding water everywhere.