“But when Champagne arrived, we pulled our heads off each others’ shoulders, same height we were, and her mouth was upon me, a black hole approaching. Our teeth clicked at each other, and she breathed into me. There was so much moisture! I found myself flying quickly around her mouth, a bat scanning the walls. As food stuck between molars makes explorers of tongues, the tongue becoming topographer and ever canker sore a ridge of saw-toothed mountains, so did my tongue become the mapmaking conquistador of Mary-Kate’s dark wet mouth. I knew its crevices, its stalactites and stalagmites, the smooth runs of the tops of her flat back teeth. I fought for dominion wit her tongue, which probed my mouth while guarding her own. After thirty seconds, having explored her mouth’s offered worlds, I want farther and soon could feel the extremities of her brain, could tickle its smooth underside. I scuttled around the back of her skull, was pinballing between cartilage and capillary, then up again, devouring and searching, her eyes like marbles in my mouth. That reminded me: I opened my lids to see if hers were open too but they were not, they were closed but just barely, lips resting softly atop mine, and so I closed my lids too and went farther into her, into her center, and there, finally, I found her landscape. It was dark where she was and I could see almost nothing, doubted what I knew, but I did make out her winding river, a thin and clear one, warm from the day’s sun, and then her cluster of a dozen or so small hills, and at their base was her tall white home, clean and fair in the spotlight of a three-quarter moon, illuminated within by a hundred tall thin candles.”