Brian Turner
Last Night's Dream
Last Night's Dream
for Ishtar
In the dream her breasts become confused in my lips. I shoot an azimuth to her navel while her fingertips touch me with concussions, as if explosives rang through the nerves of my body, as if I am strung with wire, a huge receiver of UHF radio transmissions, frequency hopping with our tongues as we kiss and I slide into her with a sound of flashbang grenades that make her eyes cloud over in smoke from the heat of it.
In the dream she kisses Arabic into my skin and I understand every word of it, I transcribe it backwards into cuneiform and stone, I rename the arteries and veins for every river and wadi from Dohuk north to Basra south, I feel for this geography of pleasure, my tongue is a marker that writes even in the rain, even in salt and sweat, and I write with it now, over every curve and turn of her body.
In the dream our orgasm destroys a nation, it leaves thermite and gunpowder in the air above us, a crackling of radio static as we kiss on, long into the denouement of skin and fire, where medevac helicopters fly in the dark caverns of our lungs in search of the wounded, and we breathe them one to another, a deep rotorwash of pain and bandages.