I have been keeping something quieter than love-notes in the fold
of
your lip.
Tonight I counted the colonies:
S. salivarius tracing maps in auroral blues;
a single Lactobacillus I inherited from the hollow beneath your
tongue
the first night we forgot how to count time.
By forty-eight hours your bacteria are small city-states inside my
cheeks—
they vote on softness,
they graffiti the mucosal underpass,
biofilm tags accruing toward calculus.
I let them. I kiss you again like feeding them.
In my gut you are still arriving—
change-rattled in the stomach’s dark train station,
slipping the acidic turnstiles with altered passports.
Six mornings later I unroll a ribbon of yesterday’s stool
and read your name spelled in taxonomic Latin.
Leave your luggage;
the caecum is a velvet guest room off the ring road of the colon.
Each of us contains the other’s colonists.
When you sleep beside me, the field between our chests hums—
two heart-sutras syncing at 68 bpm, then 65,
then finally a pulse owned by no single ribcage.
Pause.
Our vagus nerves thread like streetlamps left on by both
municipalities.
I wake tasting electricity and whichever part of you
protein-welded itself to the underside of my diaphragm.
Somewhere my IgA has tattooed your antigenic avatar
in invisible ink along the marginal tissue of my tonsils—
tolerance paperwork, stamped and filed.
Years from now, if the world begins tasting bitter again,
my immune system will remember you as safe passage:
a border once stormed and never regretted.
Once, a viral council stages a brief walkout; fever checks passports
at
each bridge.
We renegotiate: rest —
and the border opens at dawn.
So keep the kiss going.
Let the overspill of boroughs ring our molars.
I will lick the last decimal places of you off the still-wet night,
then leak them back with a slow, half-open forwarding address at
customs.
When archaeologists graze their brushes over the calculus of our
era,
let them find
two separate names
forensically entangled in one shard of calcified heartbeat,
saying:
here,
they practiced the oldest form of surrender—
the continual betrayal of skin for skin,
the gorgeous mistake of boundary
shared like breath, like plague, like peace.