By Mimi Kunz
There is an eye in my belly, looking out of it, where the ribs are, a little to the right (my right, your left when you look at me). It’s huge, really, about the size of my hand. I can see through it at the height of my stomach. I cut holes into my T-shirts or wear see-through fabrics (it’s like wearing sunglasses). I love feeling the sun on its lid, warm and big. I love seeing a cock with it too, having my other eyes closed, kissing and watching the movements up-close.
When I tell you about the eye, you want to see it. I lift my shirt and watch your fingers come closer. They’re the same length as its lashes, so near I can’t see them anymore.
‘Sorry,’ you say, stopping before you touch my iris. You hold your hand horizontally and I give it a butterfly kiss. Our other eyes meet and we’re all over each other.
Afterwards the eye is closed, the lashes spread out in a bow under my belly.
‘Does it get tired?’ you ask.
‘Bored.’
‘Can it cry?’
‘When I put lotion in it. It loves going under water, though, it doesn’t mind the salt. I went diving and it was the most beautiful thing.’
You never use salt in your cooking, not even for pasta, not even in the water you boil the pasta in. It tastes good, though, the salmon is salty anyway. You’ve put on Gaby Moreno and I love you. I look at you all through dinner, my other eye is watching the food. Later I tell you how much I like seeing you and having my eyes closed. It freaks you out a tiny bit and you try not to show it, which makes me love you more.
‘Do you think it’s genetic?’ you ask in the morning while showing me how to make poached eggs, spinning the water, then letting the yolk glide from a bowl into the centre of the swirl.
‘Nobody I know has it, and I only got it a few months ago.’
‘How’d it start?’
I stir sugar in my coffee and try to remember.
‘I saw differently. I saw what I feel like, as well as what’s on the outside.’
I don’t like to say more so I spill my coffee which is such a bad idea, God it burns! You push a cloth onto my belly, cold, the egg water boils over the pot like the foam of the sea and suddenly I only see with two eyes. You looking at me. You lifting my shirt and you on your knees, kissing the red skin on my stomach.
It’s almost lonely without it, and then you turn and show me the eggs and they look like something I saw while diving, something between a fish and a flower, something that never saw sunlight and because of that is luminous on its own.
Mimi Kunz is a visual artist and writer living in Brussels with her family, where she founded ‘Something Beautiful’, a festival for Visual Art and Poetry. Her poems and stories have appeared in Entropymag, The Adjacent Pineapple, Flash Frontier, and Ellipsis. See more on www.mimikunz.com, or follow mimi.kunz on Instagram.
MoonPark Review 