Bruises...

...are the temporary ink spots of the skin. Carl Philips rushes into me when I study the haphazard, discolored shapes strewn across my body. How they resemble my tattoos, how they are the most crude sketches of my skin, inkblots.

My flesh is like a peach or some other soft fruit, maybe a banana or an apricot. “ Bruises disperse after a time. I have always admired that about the flesh.”

*

If I were I fruit I’d be a peach, or distant relative of such. Voluptuous and pregnant of juice and tang. I’d run down your lips and chin subtly, just to be close to that supple flesh.

*

Sometimes I wake up to the view of the inside of my arm, head buried in the crook of my elbow joint, and all I see is a gray-apricot blur like early morning thunderstorms over a choppy lake, where the sun tries to peek through the atmosphere. When I uncurl myself there is a fresh smudge of blue-purple skin. From what? I’ve learned to stop guessing. Unless accompanied by splotches of maroon elsewhere on my body, teeth marks and strands of faded, plush lines across my shoulder blades that puncture my taught skin.

But nothing is more beautiful than the bruise, an inside out star or planet on a sky of skin. Galaxies of forgotten moments dispersed on limbs.

For a time I thought he never bruised. That the richness of his flesh absorbed any other color. It wasn’t fair that he could leave marks on me but mine on him would disappear the instant my teeth left his shoulder, chest or neck. Humans leave their marks as animals do. Possession, claiming something as their own to share or not, or perhaps just to leave a reminder of territory previously explored. Maybe I didn’t trust that he was mine and only mine.

He thought I wanted to brand him, make him my possession, burn myself into him like hot iron on hide.

But that was his motive, not mine.

My marks were reminders for him, notes on a scroll of flesh to make sure he did not forget me. So when he emerged from the shower he would see the brief line of purple on his chest right below his collarbone, because I learned that was where his flesh was most supple. Condensation would gather there and he would be reminded of ivory teeth on olive oil skin.

Maybe, I like to think, he would run the nub of his thumb over the felt tip like line where my teeth had been.

*

And I suppose that is why fruit is the most illustrious, and virginal of the earth.