Say This

By Lynne Ellis

Say you drive us across the state at night, one hand on the wheel & one hand bent backwards on your lips. Love follows in the car behind, shines its brights into our rearview mirrors. Say we're on river sand, say we're in those brights, say we're in the moon dark & you wrap two fingers between my thumb & knuckle, hard. Say I tie your wrists to the animal bark of a tree & go after your ribs. Say you kiss my cheek & fill my mouth with apricots. Say this body is not my body but some beautiful splintered thing. Say we tie our ankles together & you drop a peach in my mouth & I bite. Say my mouth is a whole garden & you put your weeder through a bee nest. Say those bees pass all around you, drunk on your scent & I carry that scent on my hands & lick them in secret, fingertips all buzzing. Say my heart is pinned in two halves on the soles of my feet. Say this is just the start.

About the Author

Lynne Ellis writes in pen. Their words appear in Poetry Northwest, The Seventh Wave, the North American Review, the Missouri Review,Bracken, and many other beloved journals and anthologies. Winner of the Washburn Prize, the Perkoff Prize, and the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, she believes every poem is a collaboration. Read their digital chapbook, Future Sketchbook, online at Harbor Review. Ellis holds a Certificate in Editing from the University of Washington, serves as a poetry reader at Crab Creek Review, and is Publishing Editor of Tulipwood Books, a developmental-editing press. She wants to work with you.