Rebirth

Ohio is flat. It is quiet in the way that quiet can be unsettling, like you wish that a car would crash outside your window just to make the atmosphere vibrate a bit. Last week you were sitting in the coffee shop you find yourself in almost religiously, as if a triple grande nonfat cappuccino is your sacrament and the foam that is left over is your prayer. But the point isn’t the cappuccino or the $3.49 you spend on it. It’s that clang of the register opening, jolting you that day that wasn’t particularly different than other day. It jolted you so much, in fact, the boy behind the counter let himself laugh a little, one short burst of air through his lips. You remember him blushing in a way that a teenager blushes from just the touch of a woman’s fingertips with the passing of change. “Awake now, huh?” his voice cracking. Should you have said no? You wonder if he smells like baking biscotti when he comes home from the job the way the ends of your hair hold the scent of grease, butter and seared fish. We hold things in scents and smells. Perhaps that is who we are, what we taste and smell of.

*

Touch feels like foreign hands acquainting themselves with my skin on my back. Intimate touch is unfamiliar, unrecognizable, and incomparable. It is in the way the heels of his hands press and kneed my flesh to penetrate muscle just below the surface the way my grandmother has kneaded her own bread from fresh rosemary rolls. And I’m a child again peering up on tiptoes watching those hands work the dough and I beg just to push the tips of my fingers into it.

*

I felt the drumbeats between my ribs before I see the boys with their hands in a whir hunched over cylinders held between their knees. The fire illuminating them and washing their faces and tops of their arms in a burnt glow like an oil painting thrown into a hearth. Colors bleed and I can’t tell the difference between the beats of their hands on stretched hide or the heat of my heart. Fire crackling against parched wood and a few of them, looking as if they grew from the earth themselves, picking vegetables from their garden outlined in fine twine so only they can pass through. I watch them penetrate the raw meat and fresh vegetables dripping with hose water with wooden skewers before feeding them to the flames, dripping with water and juice and grease.

*

This is what rebirth smells like. It smells of burning word and cardboard boxes empty of beer cans; it smells of wet grass and fresh mud from left of afternoon downpours. It smells of land that is hungry for water and warmth, waiting to become tanned and baked from and oven sun, newly thawed. It smells like perfume in my hair, infused by the smoke from burning ash from cigarettes and chopped wood. It smells of hemp and something tangy and brewing like a substance would over an open fire. He looks over the glare of his glasses at me, his hands moving the way I wish they would on my body, across my skin, over the slight waves of my muscles. I imagine him taking his patient time to trace every dip and curve.

He decided to dance instead, another smaller guy filling his space over the drum, and joins the others around the fire, stomping, clapping. He sways and the girl in from of him raises her arms above her shaved head as she circles the fire, her wrists crossed there. I can feel him pinning my arms above me, wrists crossed, his palm pressing into where they overlap. He is stronger than me, a surprising strength that reverberates in my ears and off the palms of his hands onto the stretched animal skins. And I can feel those same hands on me with callused palms and limber fingers, working my skin as his hands work the drum in from of him now, swear smearing from the heat of the fire, the heat of my flesh radiating from somewhere inside of my abdomen. I look at him and want the world to pause so I can make him look at me, just hold his gaze so it feels like raindrops on my flesh.

It’s humid and the air feels like I imagine his breath would feel on the back of my neck and behind my ears, settling in damp head, sliding down the spaces and crevices that are secrets from the light, places only his mouth would find.