Status Updates From Postcolonial Love Poem

You can't know the rattlesnake's power
if you've never felt it's first name stretch and strike in your mouth---like making lightning,
unfolding fangs from the soft palate of your jaw, delivering all of it to a body you want to pull inside you:
her mouth, her throat, in your mouth and throat, her shoulders and ribcage
you would fold her in half if you could...
...And afterward, you are changed, bewildered, slow.

How many bodies have you pressed into, not for desire but for the saliva you sucked from their tongue?...
... There are different opinions about how kissing became criminal. Who hasn't drunk, hasn't begged at the well of a lover's mouth? Love has never been different from thirst, but now everything is different. All the cups are filled with dirt---even our mouths.

Touch it---not with your hands,
but with your entire sensual skin. Touch it with your flesh.

If we poison and use up our water, how will we clean our wounds and our wrongs? How will we wash away what we must leave behind us? How will we make ourselves new?