She can’t even bear this pain she carries in her lips; it’s like a 15 car pile-up, the trauma and chaos ripping through each second, while everything else not contained in the accident continues to move forward, unaffected. Her heart needs constant CPR, it needs attended by the most skilled doctors. She must be pieced together with sutures composed of light and his scent; this sinewy fusion is all that will keep her whole. In her cavernous chest, she quietly rages for him. Her longing sends a message directly to her cunt and she floods and counts the hours and conjures his taste.

When they are apart, he will send her the words, ‘I am missing you like Galileo did his truth.’

–

image & words © jennifer summer | 2013

- ‘Lust’ | Tori Amos

He says, “Your heart beats and I live because of it.”

Her heart, the one that was all over the place, all the time, the heart that climbed a mountain and then funneled back down to the ground again, irrevocably and intoxicatingly changed, the heart that jumped from her body and pirouetted on the edge of a wing that cut through the clouds. Nothing that comes from her from this point on will be the same as it was before.

He tells her, “Your heart is of infinite capacity and yet I will fill it because my desire knows no limit. It recognizes no rule, man made or determined by Gods.”

She turns over her hand and stares into an endless pool of reflective ocean, and she finds herself convinced.

–

image & words © jennifer summer | 2013

“Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, the heart that is not in love will fail the test.” – Rumi.

“Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, the heart that is not in love will fail the test.” – Rumi.

“I would be so bad at sharing you. You do realize this, yes? I think I might break apart if that’s what you needed.”

Her mind fires off inside, ‘Then don’t, don’t share me, don’t ever share me. Make me yours, possess me, consume me. Stake out every territory, sink your teeth into my flesh, use the weight behind your arms to drive me into the ground, all the way to the belly of the earth. Press a permanent ache into my thighs with your hips, brand me. I feel nothing if I don’t feel all things through you.’

She finds herself floating upward toward the ceiling, breaking through the roof, the clouds splintering as she ascends. His mouth searches over her, the heart-shape of his lips finding the heat. Her back bends into an arc, taut like a branch about to snap under the weight of winter.

And everything she doesn’t say settles into the hollow of her throat and slumbers through another season.

He says, “The whisper that you love me absolutely destroys me.”

words & photo © jennifer summer | 2013

He told her, “I would like nothing more than to love you until we are both dust, and even after that.” Her mind conjured up the image of a raging sandstorm, bits of herself flying to and fro, swirling with his. She imagined their ashes never settling in one place, but constantly canvassing new dimensions, intertwined, as tightly as fine particles will allow.

“What do you believe is after dust?” she asked him, even though she already knew the answer. He said, “I don’t. But you do, and I want you to be right.”

He reached a hand up into her hair and retrieved a fistful of stars. He hurled them against a velvet sky, where they took their places graciously and formed a new constellation.

photo & words © jennifer summer | 2013

He read her skin like tea leaves, even though he didn’t believe in that. Fingers gliding over hips, he can see things with the third eye, that eye he generally paid no mind; he could see them clearly and with a knowing fluidity he could, if not entirely erase them, smudge them into a new form. He could travel backward and put himself between her and all the things that were heading straight toward her like a derailing train; things that she didn’t invite, that were not her fault, but yet she still carried with her like a boulder. “Put me here,” he told her. “Put me in this memory. And put me there, put me in that memory, too.” So, she did, and she saw God in his face when he moved above her. He believed in her, and he believed in the ocean. And that was everything.

photo & words © jennifer summer | 2013