The Importance of Breaking Bread

It is true, her scent is in my bed sheets and I am stretching out like a feline when her fingers trail down my spine. We have returned, not to each other as though we have laid like this before, but to mornings like this when sunlight was enough to make us turn over, falling from dream into the landscape of a body. Yes, come lay along my thighs and I will whisper what will sound like the possibility of words if I could wrap my tongue around a language that isn’t you for a moment.

I am feeling holy with my curves and dips, collar bones and lips, rolling hips and relentless kissing.

I remember why certain questions are asked: on porches, in front of fires, in streets and parks or classrooms and bars just the same:

who is the man?
don’t you feel something is missing?
what do two women even do?

With her ear under my lips I gave her a secret that is a sound, voice, breath, release.

There is no man. Nothing is missing. We pass time back and forth by way of mouth and the softest passageways of the flesh.

If you do not think it is important, it is because we have not talked enough.

This began long ago and has been reduced to only whispering between women, programmed as though it were impossible for women to love each other even though we have been left to each other, over and over, left to share the songs and dances of ourselves, left in gardens together, left raising children together – taught to believe that the intimacy that has often bound us and enabled us to survive is either only friendship or pornography.

Before anything is a non-issue it has to be talked about. This takes years. It takes the highest form of communication: breaking bread.

For a year I have been mixing greens, slicing olives, eating from the earth and sharing meals with my neighbors, my life has been a stream of conversations about everything we were taught not to talk about until we realize why we were taught such things in the first place and begin to think for ourselves about the humanity we cannot turn away from, the humanity in each of us, the part of us that some will call the soul, the part of us that some will call the eyes, the part of us that many will call the heart or mind, but I believe it is called breakfast. And it is not only the things we “should not” talk about that fill the morning air, but the validation that we have come to each other, we have sat down, we have opened our mouths and offered voice, sound, breath, release.