To celebrate World Poetry Day, I’ve written a short poem below. In the meantime, check out this great site to read some wonderful “poems on poems.”

Book Skin
by Sara J. Tantlinger

I remember the fable of your veins
and how your bleeding wrists tasted
like a burnt book across my tongue.

We were nameless bodies curved
inside bent pages, keeping love hidden
between an old spine as we inhaled
ink into our hearts like black oxygen.

Spiders scurried across the dust of bones
and left cobwebs inside our eyes, but we
knew addiction would flavor our choice
to crack open skin and read scarlet stories
that swam beneath our underwritten flesh.