"First Nights" by Robin Arble

One night, I got on my hands and knees and crawled back to the night that boy flung his tongue down my throat. All around me, massive caverns kept opening and opening. His fingernails dug tunnels under my skin as his tongue slid down the walls of my lungs, planted leeches in my stomach, then slithered back to suck on my youngest cavity. Later, as we pretended to sleep, his hands planted orchids in my wrists as our taste buds bloomed. Those leeches fed on absolute blackness until I starved myself so dry they suffocated on air, and once I knew they were dead, I filled every hole in my body with salt and vinegar until nothing grew back. I crawled into the cave behind that boy’s couch the first night you slid your hand up my shirt, and my whole body opened and opened as you touched the youngest part of me.

Robin Arble is a poet and writer from Western Massachusetts. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Oakland Arts Review, beestung, Door Is A Jar, Pøst-, One Art,Overheard, ALOCASIA, Midway Journal, and Your Impossible Voice, among others. They are a poetry reader for Beaver Magazine and the Massachusetts Review. She studies literature and creative writing at Hampshire College.