pamper

Written by Ivy Lu from Fairmont Preparatory Academy, California, USA

i do not crave the tempestuous myth of love –

no fantasy vows nor kisses of devotion

but rather the quiet, sacerdotal rites

of being tended to.

i want to be handled as one handles relics:

with a reverence that trembles at the wrist.

count me–

not in measures of worth of want,

but in sunspots and freckles, those constellatory blemishes

scattered like tiny stars across my cheeks.

enumerate them as if each one were

a psalm you dared not misrecite.

tuck the stray filament of my hair

behind the lobe of my ear

with a precision bouldering on devotion –

as if the gesture itself were liturgy

and I, the sanctum of which it echoes.

there is a hunger in me, yes –

but not the ravenous, ruinous kind.

it is a softer famine,

a yearning to be cradled –

not metaphorically, but in the literal curvature of arms.

hold my face 

as one would a porcelain vessel

threatening its own shattering.

let your palms palpate my cheeks, 

let your thumb dandle my lower eyelid

and gently wipe my tears

as they drip down the veins of your wrists

and write me –

not in the vulgar brevity of modern tongue,

but in a vocabulary i cannot access alone.

compose me into something decipherable,

something luminous,

as if i were a fable from years ago.

for i have long existed,

as an untranslated text.

let me be the language you linger over

let me be infused in the music you write

let me be the sentence you refuse to finish

because ending it would mean

releasing it.

this is my confession.

i do not wish to be loved loudly –

but meticulously.

in the infinitesimal acts,

the nearly invisible devotions,

the affirmations that say

i am here, and i will not rush you –

there,

i unravel.