Language is my dreamscape, my boy-toy, my husband, my pen-pal, my delivery boy. Language is a complimentary dollop of almond infused body butter or a convenient spray of dry shampoo on my tired locks. Language is the breath of God, the bellows from the underworld, it’s the tickle of dust that flows into nostrils when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic memoirs; language is the lingering scent of booze secreting from my lost love’s pores, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on somebody’s stairs, a match held inside a dismal chasm. It is the trusting leak from a mother’s breast, the roughcast memory of my true love’s touch, dead, still breathing into my ear, calloused fingers on the surface of granite crag, the bashful growth on the belly of a post-pubescent Italian boy... It is winter’s virginal snowfall ravaged by my old Doc Martin boot.
—Mary Catherine McSweeney