| . | These Humid Desires Allison Alsup When winter's forceps clamp around the streets of that salty Northeastern town, the subway's portal surfaces: dusted by exhaust and dimly lit a periscope on concrete; or the marquee of a movie house fallen into disrepute. Below the subway tunnel pumps with the heated wetness of an internal organ; a submerged lung gasping in the suck of passing trains. Like yeast, flesh rises with steam, that hurried breath of commute and the body exhales, its skin porous as cork. So easy here to sink into a slipstream of longing; to imagine a fantastic sum has fallen through the hole of my coat pocket and lies nested in the lining. To purchase the world: Swiss chocolates, Chinese silk. The throttle of an arriving train brings with it a desperate flutter like a moth landed on the tongue, sodden sings that no longer lift but beat against closed lips, I think Two years now and still a stranger. At home, there was no snow and Mexico lay as close as the boy who could have taken me there. Now alone in a catacomb of wasted chances comes the scent of something curdled and sallow. I breathe through my scarf. For as a wet swimsuit sealed in plastic or oranges left on the sill, so too these humid desires, things forgotten, now lie bloated with fermentation and only remain to be discarded slotted away with the subway token before the return to the surface to the crimped faced of mediocre lovers and offices tasting of novocaine, to the winds that puncture the nostrils and threaten to fray the edges of my face; winds that splinter vice into blanched chips, swept away, these winds that sift desire, tincturing a grey powder infertile as ballasted dirt or silt collected at the bottom of an arctic lake, these winds that dehydrate the heart until it can be cupped by a thimble. |
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-Allison Alsup