We could speak of the lightning and the thunder, the surge of you under me, the plunder, the plough, the release, but today I think only of you as softness. Yes, we are electric, or so people have said, but they will not understand this milder hum that arrives upon me in the same way the smell of honeysuckle tickles your nose in spring, or the way dust specks dance in a spill of sunlight. I think such softness always existed between us. That first time we met, it extended lik

We assume dancing begins as the music does, but so often it begins here: with the erupting, unbridled sound of a woman laughing too loudly outside the bar, her joy escaping her before she can decide whether to be embarrassed by it. Or maybe over there, with the smiling stranger who holds the door open for your friend as though he has always known her, or upstairs where the old man twangs an old guitar. Isn't it wonderful to witness the impossible mathematics of solitary lives

Artist: Emma Statham - "Lust"- Part of the Seven Deadly Sins series. You came to me before your body did. Long before your hands, before your mouth, before the first impossible mercy of touch, you arrived as weather. Not the weather that gathers above us, but the weather that gathers within the earth- the slow accumulation of unbearable pressure, continents shifting by fractions, mountains learning they were always meant to implode. You moved through me with the silent au

Flame is the most honest architecture, moving through lacquer and lintel, through polish and pose, until it finds the load-bearing lie in the city of self and worries it loose, and the walls, relieved of their performance, confess what they were built to conceal. It strips varnish back to grain, splits beam from seam and makes seen the fine-veined ligature of desire stitched beneath plaster and praise, and in that bright unhousing what seemed solid admits what it always was: