Amy Palko

  Moonbeams slip through the gap between the curtains and penetrate slumbering dark. Soft light plays across your shoulder, gently caressing your collarbone, the length of your throat. I trace these lines with my fingertips, following the light. Here, in the depth of night, I am attracted to the light – like a moth, I press myself to your skin, lost to the promise of illumination. Early morning rays from an awakening sun escape the horizon and chase the shadows back to the corners, beneath the bed, under the covers. A rosy glow spreads across sleep warm skin, languid limbs… some sweet seraphim, duvet wrapped, lies beside me in deep…

  Those places we hide without conscious thought of why. The soft flesh where the skin seems thinner. The secret workings of our insides rising up to meet the light touch of a gentle lover. Crook of elbow. Bend of knee. Curl of lobe. Hollow of throat. Underside of breast. Plane of inner thigh. Swoop of instep. The fine networks of vein and artery and nerve leap in erratic rhythm here – here – and here. Slowly exposing these tender places we shed our doubts and don the transparent veil of trust, of faith. Relinquishing control, we give ourselves over to the sensation of tender touch against tender flesh, and…

I can sense a stirring in the creative cauldron we all hold deep inside our bodies. Melding and merging. Combining and catalyzing. Swirling and sparking. I hold this space inside myself where new life leaps from dark oblivion into sentience, into actualized being. Coiled in upon itself, this embryo of life begun spins out its own lifeline, threads itself into the text, inscribes its meaning into palimpsests of presence. And all the while, I hold the space in which it grows. That cauldron stirred by our wisest selves …hubble, bubble, toil and… Cells double and divide, double and divide watched over, worried over, worked over by the mother part of…