One of the better feelings in the world is the yellowing taste of receding sickness in your mouth reminding you are still capable of aspiring towards zones of pleasure. Right before the kiss, consider the menthol of the cough lozenge cloving your dry mouth icy. And right at the moment of the kiss, threads of arctic breath drizzling out your mouth like lines of strain on a dusk sky purpling into those very zones of pleasure. The kiss is no spectacle, offering no congratulations but the private steam of two people longing for other people and discovering, door latched and clothes strewn, they don’t quite know what to do with time. So you let your mouths pluck at each other to weave through your bodies the shape of unattainable language like a vein of faint gold pulsing through the ore to tickle bone and extract the past-expiry-date tangy juice of metal. You discover afterwards it is difficult to think clearly during agony or anger, given the mind is restless from leaving a place where it felt loved. Now it cannot return, having formed a fist of sugared fingers fighting the want to be frozen. In the middle of your anger there were tears and yet there is no salt on the napkin that wipes them. Still there is gratitude to be offered. For the napkin. For this hunger.