3/31/10

Cathedral of His Ribcage
By Paula Ray


My skin is Braille beneath his fingertips and each time he traces my lines, words I’ve never heard myself say aloud pop to my surface in the form of goosebumps. How needy this, “love me, love me, love me,” bell, clanging in my steeple-head, must sound to everyone else. But not to this man, who worships at the altar of my heart and kneels before my spirit, as if there is something sacred within me, a Saint of feminine virtue, a soul virgin—untouched until he found me. He looks beyond my demons and the vulgarity of my past indiscretions and bathes me in the light of his eyes. So brightly they glow like stained-glass windows and I want to tell him: the feeling’s mutual. I want him to hear me singing a cappella, a soprano releasing hymns of praise within the cathedral of his ribcage.

He presses his chest to mine and I hear him harmonizing and I know he hears everything. Everything…


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Paula Ray chews words and blows them like bubbles. Sometimes they pop in her face and get embedded in her hair. Other times, they splatter on the screen in front of her and litter literary zines. When she isn't pushing letters around, she plays instruments and attempts to bring the dead ones back to life and find good homes for them in area schools with low budgets and high student populations. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in: Weirdyear, Word Riot, elimae, and many other wordy places. Visit her blog: http://musicalpencil.blogspot.com/