by Keetje KuipersIt's summer. Eighty-five degrees. We've spent all day on a blanket in the high grass of an abandoned cemetery. The backs of my thighs are sunburned and tomorrow I'll shiver as the heat pours out of my skin. Earlier, when I climbed onto you for the second time, I could see a row of headstones through the trees. And when I rocked over you their round and rain-worn scalps rose into my line of sight until I could imagine the bodies beneath them propped up, watching us make love. Each one of their wide skulls silently smiled as if remembering something sweet and fleeting, and not wanting to tell me so. I needed to explain to them then that my body has been a bell that's waited years to be rung by you. That the cartilage grinding in my hip sockets when I move against you makes a dust finer than the finest semolina flour and I pay it out from my body willingly. That finally coming to love you has been a hard-earned pleasure, so that every time you enter me I want to cry out, Bury me, bury me. Put me in the ground.
