Telephones

Published in the Spring 2013 edition of the Columbia Review

I am going to eat telephones
The way you chew the ends of words like March, stars, lover 
Has successfully driven me crazy
I am going to eat telephones because your idiolect is as rich as a Romance language
I want to taste your midnight radio Hallelujah Chorus Leonard Cohen three-course red velvet dessert basso profundo
I am going to eat telephones because I want to steal that voice of yours
I want to stretch my stomach around that luxurious growl tiger-pacing inside the cages of your sentences
Threatening to charge from your line to mine
I will hold your voice reverberating inside me violently as if it would Cesarean out or re-incarnate in my throat
I’m going to eat telephones so that in three years
When you stop saying hi to me at the library
I will breathe deeply, and your drawl will sigh out of me like smoke
Sometimes, I’ll smoke you, fresh, full smoke
I will offer you white and cumulus to the sunrise
I will measure the day with you, counting each exquisite draw
Needing no alarm clock but the thunderclap of your every inflection
I’m going to eat telephones so that I will hold the cadence of your speech beside my heartbeat
Drum louder than that blood pump in my chest so that I can dance to you as they dance in my hometown at a market day festival
Or on a day when the rain is a relentless barrage of beats charming the animal out of the men—and the women
I am going to eat telephones whole, swallow them like a snake so that, lying paralyzed after my meal, I will just listen to the ringing when you call
Call me
I want to be your answer
I want you
Clunky mahogany Victorian contraption of a telephone
I want you golden brass stick-my-fingers-into-the-numbers-and-swing rotary telephone
I want you obnoxious iGadget in unnatural colors cellular
Or a duet of paper cups attached with string
I’ll digest you and put you back together with my heartstrings
I am going to eat telephones, dismantle them
The buttons are caviar, but your voice is my bread and water
Maybe I’ll just drink you, and you’ll hydrate my desert esophagus
Polish my Stonehenge diaphragm
Fill my empty canyon gut
I am going to eat telephones
Because I am hungry for your love

~

“The speaker who is consumed by love wants to consume love.” -Sophia Sanchez, Teeth Slam Poets