John Biscello

   If there were two, then let us say there were two. The two danced on the time-haunted deck of the Titanic, they called it the Titanic because they understood the floor beneath their feet was not to be trusted, nor the worldscape, which was always at the mercy of shifting tectonic plates. Here today, gone tomorrow. Gone tomorrow, here today.

   She, one of the two, lowered herself upon the creak-wooden floor and blew him. She rose up, musky penile skinflakes clinging to her lips, and he, the other of the two, lowered down and blew her. They swapped out organs liberally, as they saw fit, they were measurably reciprocal in their take and give.

   They blew each other back and forth seesaw-style because they loved each other, because wind was their mentor and silence their grace, because they desired to become immaculately vulgar, they blew each other because the fate of every Titanic was inescapable, they blew each other because they were two.

   There might have been others. They didn’t see them. She said she was a mother once, possibly twice. He said he played a child at least a thousand times. Every generation slips a knot. The blue want of the world was hunger impossible, or desperate flights from hunger impossible.

   He wet the tip of his finger and plugged it inside his ear, conceiving of ear as he did this, imagining it a bright clay appendage, a tender mollusk. She removed her ear and replaced it with wax candy lips, a Cubist invention of her own volition. They, the two, devoured each other historically, simultaneously.

   The world had gone and stayed unimaginably gone. They were two, and they were. It was enough. The most concise and satisfying math equation ever. To be there and to be gone. To be simultaneous and to absent. They found all this out by dreaming through and through. I mean dreaming that went all the way through, no turning back.

   Imagine, if you will, two tiny O-shaped mouths like goldfish puckers, suckers for absorption, and therein lies the gremlins, mysteries and vast greening ponderances of life.

   Once upon a time…