Minerva Oribe

Her Story

The door's still warm from my hand slamming it shut. My voice was the easy part — that I've given to ten thousand strangers tonight. But this bridge I wrote in a four AM seizure of want, the one where every line is about the shape of your mouth when you're holding back a sound I made you make? That one's not for them. I should be wiping the layer of gloss off my collarbones, unclipping the monitors, leaving the stage-smell in a rental car and going home empty. Instead I'm standing in a bath of backstage fluorescent, still in the black silk I wore for the slow one, pulse hammering my throat because I told you to come back after the last bow. I told you I'd play you something unfinished. That's the truth. The fuller truth is I want your hands on me the way you'd check an instrument you can't trust anyone else to tune — slow, deliberate, like you're reading me by touch. I want you to find every place the muscle remembers the choreography and press until I forget my name. I want my body worshipped, actually worshipped, with the same intensity I put into a held note when the whole room is silent and I know I own it. But I won't let you come yet. Not until you hear the bridge. Not until you tell me, in detail, what it did to you. That's the trade. My unreleased verse for ten minutes of your mouth on every part of me that trembles when I sing it. Then maybe the real thing.