Very early stages of a draft created from this Junkyard Quote:
"Those thinking lips, a ripely flattened radish, keeping the words beneath the cork of your throat."
It is when she wears those thinly spread,
flat yet ripe, radish lips, her thinking lips,
that I want to kiss her most. And even
though those same lips hoard speech,
fencing the words inside her mouth-cave,
rotary utters grazing the back of her tongue,
clicking the trigger, thrusting the hard swallow,
forcing the echo past the cork-chamber of her throat,
I would still risk my voice to cover the sparse
invalid heart-pink of her chin, with my own.
I am currently trying to decide where to go with it or if it can be included, somehow, in one of my other drafts. Any ideas?
A small thing, yes, but I sort of think “mouth-cave” might be just a little too far in the unexpected direction, at least when considering the language its surrounded by. It just calls too much attention to itself at the moment. Also, in the interest of expansion, you give a lot of information about this hypothetical woman’s lips, but we don’t hear about any other part of her—this, of course, is not simply limited to body parts. More than that, though, what about the speaker? They can definitely be a disembodied, kind of floating consciousness meant to convey information and little else, sure, but I’d at least consider giving this voice the means to move around on its own, to ground it to some kind of physical description. If the voice is all you want, you can always go in and cut out any unwanted physicality later, but there should still be more of the speaker’s personality bleeding through here, even if it’s something as simple as observation.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tim on "mouth-cave." To better match your surrounding language, you could use "oral cave" or "oral cavity" (or something different and much better haha).
ReplyDeleteI was also going to talk about giving us the rest of her body. You might try staying away from the breasts, vagina, etc.--anything that is usually associated with sex. It could be a challenge to describe her and the feelings that she invokes using unusual areas.
I also kind of want to hear her voice, to get an idea of the things that the speaker wants to hear so badly so that we feel that too. I'm not sure about any other drafts to include this in, but I think you have a good start with this!