In our room, by which I mean my room, we go around and discuss how we expect everything to taste: the tapestry, the doorknob. He picks up the salt lamp. They pass it around. They taste it. Apparently in Egypt they used to eat salt before walking into the desert to die. I think it’s badass, they think it’s sad. I think tongues are weird. I say tongues should be the subject of a horror movie where they have minds of their own. The boys on the small red rug of my bedroom floor try to see if they can choke themselves with their tongues. Can you still breathe through your nose? I pray the gagging noises don’t wake up my roommate through the wall. Call it a test run.
Last summer, the lamp was damp with humidity. We debate which girl of the room crept over in the night to lick it as I slept, conscious or otherwise. Night, when the tongues were our owners.
At the Renaissance fair, a woman decked out in a Victorian dress in the embrace of the heat wave takes drink suggestions from the crowd: oat milk, ipa, pina colada. She sings, I like my men like I like my pina coladas: refreshing in the summer, trapped in a blender.
I am reminded of the black widow, who bites her lover’s head off after mating.
It’s funny that I think a part of me gets it now.
Sorry if that’s a red flag.
A friend gets onto me for saying that if he has enough red flags, they cancel each other out.
How much simpler it would be to avoid being the drama queen and dispose of the problem right then and there.
I won’t plead self-defense but I’ll categorize the death under self-care.
Hopefully this admission never comes back to bite me.
Hopefully that pun doesn’t dismiss my earnestness.
Sitting in our modest circle on the green, the ecofeminist fight club salivates over the line, how can I even touch it, your love like an orange wedge breaking apart in my mouth.
He says what hurts the most is losing the love language you built: a flavor no one else will ever taste.
Oh, but it slips right through me in defiance of the tongue. Is the black widow satiated after eating the head of her lover? You break it all apart only to discover it’s just meat! You were already suspicious. The widow’s ritualistic reminder that this feeling is rooted in blood. The spongy membrane of a softboy and a skull sturdy enough for you to believe in.
I don’t mean to imply that the spiders are ruled by heteronormativity, but I still get along with the women I’ve kissed.