New-car smell, like tight bleached
leather and cigarettes, united with
new sweat and congealing saliva.
A salty sex smell. Crawl back into
bed and bring the corner of your
shirtsleeve to your mouth. Inhale.
Relive climax over again in your mind,
silently to yourself, alone. Power runs
through every vein with the idea of a
new sexual identity, a surreptitious
fraction of you only fully exposed under
orange streetlights and moth eaten sheets.
Wake with the stale taste of love making
on your teeth, sluice it away with tap water,
drink it in, rinse. When hair drifts onto your
lips, you perceive the tang of his sweat. You
scrub yourself fresh; below your stomach
you are slick and sweet, still tender from
friction. Chafe the dried aftersex from your
aching breasts, damp from a night of
perspiration. Smooth heels are scuffed clean
from their encasement of garden soil and
parking lot grime. Lather fragrant soaps to
massage your legs with, licked by strange
tongues and sticky from strange salves.
You scrub, lather, chafe, rub, scrape,
massage away the evidence of your sexuality.
Imagine your expression when the bruises can't be washed away.
