The Taste That Stays
The mouth remembers what the mind forgets.
You press your tongue to the roof of your mouth, and there it is again… that edge, that salt. Years later and your body still remembers. The meal and the lover – the sound that hung in the air while you were eating together… laughing till you were crying with a mouth full of…
The body is an archive that stores flavor. A presence once inside you. This is the strange power of erotic memory… it does not obey time, it lives in the body’s archive. We taste lovers years later, the taste of a poem that cracked us open, a version of ourselves we’ve never expressed.
The fig tree blooms
And I turn on–
Extending my archive.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TMC), the mouth is the opening to the spleen and stomach, the organs of nourishment and transformation. A healthy mouth processes, integrates and metabolizes at the same time as it speaks. A longing and dry mouth signals that something is untransformed, still caught between intake and release. So in essence, the mouth is where desire, intake, transformation and expression meet.
To taste is to draw the world into you… not just food, but life, love and memory.
In Call Me by Your Name, a peach becomes a body and a body becomes a threshold. But erotic taste-memory is not always sweet – sometimes it’s bitter, sour or sharp. A burnt espresso or an iron tang or the late-night cold of leftover wine. It is the piano notes that rise after the bite. It is Nina Simone singing I Put a Spell on You as your fingers slip into someone’s hair. It is Sade’s Cherish the Day leaving a honeyed hush in your mouth.
In Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown writes of pleasure as political memory… how the body holds what culture silences. In this way, the aftertaste is evidence, not simply nostalgia. A trace of being truly met, touched, pierced, recognized.
I taste you still, in the back of my mouth, where no one sees.
I taste you in burnt toast, in citrus peel, in the metallic edge of tears.
In Taoist sexual alchemy, the mouth and the yoni mirror each other. Both are portals; soft, fluid, and alive with qi… the pulse of life-force. The lips above and the lips below drink, taste and transmute. A kiss, like a caress, draws energy inward; a word, like a moan, releases it. Certain Taoist practices involve circulating energy between the mouth and the genitals (and then up the spine,) which are considered acts of balancing yin and yang, harnessing erotic life-force for vitality and spiritual elevation. There’s an ancient poetic metaphor that says
the mouth drinks words; the yoni drinks presence
To feel taste on the tongue is to awaken the echo of taste in the pelvis. The erotic memory hence becomes chemical. It’s the body whispering “I have been entered here, and I have not forgotten.”
You see echoes of this in Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, where each plate is yoni-shaped, set on a table of remembrance. To sit at this table and eat here is to taste history, loss and survival. In kitchens across time, women have known this. The kitchen was never just a site of labor, but a site of sensual power – chopping, stirring, licking the spoon. Food has always been a language of desire and longing.
To feed is to leave a taste.
To love is to leave a taste.
To live is to leave a taste.
To create is to leave a taste.
In Hannah Wilke’s sculptures, we see the folds of candy-colored flesh, melting into the erotic and the grotesque. In Faith Ringgold’s story quilts, the family table becomes the axis of Black survival, joy and generational eroticism. Each of these examples are flavors. They are bites, licks, tastes that stay long after the eyes close.
The surrealist Leonora Carrington once said
“The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope,
while the left eye peers into the microscope.”
The same could be said of the tongue; it is a magnifier of presence and a tracker of absence. Think of Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I, her hand filming her own aging skin, collecting what others discard. The aftertaste is like this. What remains after the experience is gone… it cannot be commodified, filtered or posted.
In a synthetic world, taste cannot be automated. We can simulate a voice, replicate a painting, and generate a lover’s text, but we cannot reproduce the chemical fusion of tongue and memory.
Your mouth holds the map of your life… a sensory record.
You’ve tasted birth. You’ve tasted death. You've tasted becoming.
There’s nothing that can do this for you or take this away from you.
In the Blood of Aurora current, we do not rush to rinse our mouth clean. We let taste linger on the tongue. We let the honey stay on the lips. We hold the edge of grief in the back of our throat, as proof. What truly nourishes us is the taste our memories leave behind.
Enter the BOA-Current.
(Journal) Prompts
What taste lives in your mouth from a moment that changed you?
Where in your body do you carry the residue of an old intimacy?
What flavor would your creative life have right now?
Spend 3 minutes eating something slowly. Close your eyes for a few seconds and let your tongue tell you a story.
Write a short letter to someone whose taste has stayed. Do not send it.
Name a song that currently pulls a flavor into your mouth. Pull it up and listen with headphones. Dance or subtly move as you go. Use the title of the song as your prompt for a stream of consciousness exercise. Set your phone to alarm you in 10 minutes and just go without thinking twice about what you say. Read it back to see if you’ve decoded a secret message from your body.
Imagine a future version of you tasting this moment. What will she remember?
What would it feel like to make your next creative work as if it was a dish?
Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party. 1974–1979, mixed media, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Wilke, Hannah. Pink Champagne. 1975. Latex with snaps, 45.7 x 137.2 x 17.8 cm (18 x 54 x 7 inches), unique. Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Ringgold, Faith. The Purple Quilt. 1986, acrylic on canvas with tie-dyed, pieced fabric border, 91 x 72 in.
Carrington, Leonora. And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur. 1953, oil on canvas, 23 5/8 × 27 9/16 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Chia, Mantak. Figure 1.15. 2009, illustration, The Alchemy of Sexual Energy: Connecting with the Universe Within, Destiny Books.
