Salivic

Aphrodisiac river
Salivic room
You on all fours:
what hunger looks like
Like a parenthesis, your body against mine
And the moon, the way it eats you alive
I watch you dig at my tailbones
What I want you to know is:
Everything that passes through you
will find a way to linger
& resurface months later
It will dye your insides
a quiet turquoise
And in the dead of the night
a body will ask another
are you awake/alive
Desire, or maybe some sadder thing
In the dark they will take turns
looking down each other’s throats
And us, we stuff our insides
The touching of my sick organs, then noise
On my raw eyes:
you undo whatever fluorescence
is left in you
Look, there’s light after all, you tell me
And I grip your skeleton & it softens
You are more ghost than I expected
Out of breath you say:
I found your face the other day
In some small & expiring thing

Mars Hu is a poet based in New York. Her writing has been published in The Poetry Society, Tinderbox, Cleaver, Glass Poetry Press, Hyphen Magazine, and more. Nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and a finalist for the 2018 Orison Anthology Award in Poetry, she edits for Indolent Books.