Pillow Talk by Saehee Cho

Valerie Hammond, "Touch," 2011 (pigment, color pencil, wax on paper)

one.

A barely sagged face, the bud of fatigue.
And also beauty, clean and silver skinned, a cut.

two.

She can admit with ease that she is a believer in signs, in the quantifiable impossibility of coincidence.

She can admit with ease, her delight that coincidence has favored their reunion.
They are filled with brevity, drunk with the thrill of impermanence

three.

It is a deep sound, a bellyish tone followed by a sharp jolt underneath her bed. Her body throws itself upwards, a sudden
erectness and his body follows suit. She cannot tell if his response is to the earthquake or to her. They cling at each
other, an instinctive grip until she fades, unpeels from his chest, embarrassed.

Heavy lidded he mumbles something incoherent, lets the words wilt before exiting the mouth and remembers nothing in
the morning.

four.

She leans into it. The wonder of geological rub, the pulled meaning of their bodies in sway.

five.

Bony legs, she has never seen in light.  She can only feel the appearance of him, the color of his hair, a milky brown.

Her head goes light into sleep as she considers skipped parts.

six.

It isn’t with distaste when she observes his face, tumbled.
Only, not quite what she had held up with so much beauty.

seven.

He slides under covers, foggy eyed. Lit skin and something growing dense in his center.
A soft warm lust–temperate, present.

eight.

He rises from a far gone sleep only to kiss her, not necessarily sweetly so much as compulsively and she wonders if this
too is a thing he does unaware as in a dream and whether this makes it more or less true.  She pivots around the word
“true”, regards it with scrutiny, like the word might make its own light, illuminate something.