Your back, before me, is a page I cannot read. An alphabet of moles, a map of reliefs where my gaze stumbles and proceeds by touch.

The tongue this skin speaks has no verbs, only warm nouns: collarbone, shoulder blade, lumbar curve. I translate with eyes closed, with my lips.

Every breath that lifts the ribs is an exclamation point. Every shiver running under the skin a comma, a moment of suspension before the sentence—body—reaches its full stop, trembling, against mine.

I do not seek the meaning. I lose myself in the phonetics. In the muffled sound of bone pressing, in the hiss of the sliding sheet, in the mute cry that writes itself only when our hieroglyphs overlap, and the message —finally—is clear.