Vanessa doesn't breathe.
She drinks life in
like a long cold vase of champagne
past the perfect shining teeth
through the gates of that square, raw jaw
and down the ecstatic tunnel of her long throat,
and it's like she's singing backward,
and you can hear every note sweetest
as it disappears.

And all the while she watches you,
intently reading you,
gathering the details that you are.
The deepest, most cryptic
code of your story
is her informative text.
What she'll do with that information
is anybody's guess.
One thing is certain:
it will make her happy,
no matter what it is,
and she will sing it back to you
with her next breath,
and you will hear it new and better
like you never knew it,
your own life,
before she told it back to you this way.


by Sara, copyright 2002, all rights reserved