My Lover is a Sandwich I Can Eat in Seven Bites

A sultry dribble of clear beef juices down the peach fuzz of my face’s blunt edge. The giddy resistance of yeasted crust, the animal act of baring teeth. Smear of lipstick at the edges of my mouth. Cream and refrigerator chill. Intrusive wisp of lettuce at the back of the throat. Ticklish. Gagging. My lover, my loved, the sauerkraut wedged between the gaps in my teeth, the sour and the squeak and the moldering funk of cabbage. The caraway seed stowed away behind a molar, cracked open in a moment of idle tongue-play, blooming over my mouth, my breath.

You: a hard, impossible exterior. Me: a ladleful of near-boiling, oil-slicked jus, bovine-savory. A hot mustard squirt between my fingers. Squeamish snap of squeaking pickle. Off-white juice of the insides of you rolling down the heel of the sandwich-holding hand. The heel is my favorite part of the hand, better even than the Mount of Venus, than the canyons between the articulate fingers. Biteable when the teeth get anxious, warm edge of the cradling hand on your cheek, first dollop of warmth before the walloping kiss. What holds the bread together is the gluten, the chains of stretchy protein smacked against each other until they are forced to hold each other close. The chew, the resistance you meet in the bread: chemicals holding hands, the first intimacy between supple molecules.

These days, I’m food-shy in groups of people: how to bite into the sandwich with my lipsticked mouth. How to make a beautiful mess even when everybody’s watching. We kiss with my lipsticked mouth and for a little while it’s smeary and crimson and we’re afraid for the white sheets, but then you kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss and suddenly we are clean and I am scrubbed by the flat blade of your tongue and there is no more color but the flooded flesh of our cheeks.

You, lover, loved, you have depersonalized your mouth, the lumpy chemical perceptions inside of it. You tell me all of the things you love to let inside of you, and it’s all theoretical. You run your body on the hypothetical, the deconstructed elements of nourishment. My loved, my Martian lover, you have hacked into the mainframe. You and your soylent habituation, your streamlined brain, o baby o god I envy this and you more than I can fit inside of my mouth.

My lover, my loved, I wish I did not love this slut of a tongue so much. This wretched hedonist that lives in the damp cave of my live skull. I wish she did not rule my life with her horny appetites. Lord o lover o loved I wish I had never had a drop of the good chemical. The good chemical is the puddingy paste of chocolate-in-a-jar clogging the deep hollows in my teeth. The good chemical is mustard vapor burning a hole in my jelly-brain. The good chemical is the quaking between our tangled legs makes me crave whole sticks of Irish butter; the good chemical is the way you squirt hotly inside of me and it makes me want to leap out from under you and throw a brisket in the oven, even as I never want to let your briny-slick body go.

When I say I love you what I mean is I want to fill your fridge like a body part. When I ask if you’re hungry I am asking if you want me when I am trapped in the hedonistic wreckage of my inconvenient body. Will you still love me with soggy lettuce scrunched between my big teeth? with the clear juices of a dead and roasted body under my tongue? Will you still love my body when it’s impossible to satisfy? Will you still want a thing that wants, and unprettily?

The kitchen knife scares you. It takes you many minutes and a whole lot of nerve to sever one wet wheel from the tiny tomato’s ready body. The pepper grinder scarcely occurs to you. Our tongues are bewitched by different things. I am trying to remember that this is okay, this magical differential. Someday we’ll eat together. Someday I will trap you with a hot pot of something heady-smelling. A platter, a bowl, a parsley garnish. Someday you’ll run your tongue over cold ceramic to catch every last drop, and you will know the animal intensity of my brain, strange and pink like rushing blood under the bitten skin.

Kelsi Long is an MFA candidate in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She serves as a Co-Managing Editor at Hunger Mountain, and is a Poetry Co-Editor at Mud Season Review. Her work has appeared in Memoir Mixtapes, Sad Girl Review, Menacing Hedge, and elsewhere. Her poem, “#notallwolves,” was nominated by Sword & Kettle Press’s Corvid Queen for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, she now lives in Montpelier, Vermont. Find her on Twitter @tweetsbykelsi.