THUMBELINA

I am so thankful that your mouthful of 88 piano keys charmed itself into my ear. I am so lucky to have a handful of chocolate brown hair in a bushel, bunched up, brushing my fingertips when you lie in my lap. Your mouth slack and your pink lips parted ever so slightly. Your rose-colored cheeks and green eyes and tan nose and chestnut freckles and blue-violet veins beneath the skin; all the good colors of some angel in a Renaissance painting. Your eyelashes so soft and long I close my eyes and imagine them brushing up and down the lеngth of my body. If only I could be so small to lie in your eyеlashes as a hammock. Swim in the whites of your eyes. Dive off the Cupid’s bow of your lip. Hang with two hands from the corner of your smile like Peter Pan from a clock tower. Dance and splash in the tiny brown puddles of every single freckle. Crawl into the lobe of your ear and hide in the seashell cavern where I can hear the ocean and whisper it back to you. Your face brings me all the joy of the entire world, right to my bed. Right to my hands. Right in the breath like a tide in your chest.