down in me

Is it for the Spaniards’ rape of all my grandmothers? Because I’m not pristine, I’m dirty, my creases and holes dark, and yet they want in them. My mouth a torrent of steely breathy truths never spoken by a lady. And yet I want them in them. They fucked my mothers and now I will fuck them. Where there were drawn knees and repulsion there is now submission. You can’t rape an open womb. I’m begging for it and I can’t say I blame them, I don’t; I too want to fuck new, those compelling differences, I want in them.

I know I recite too quickly
but have a look between the covers
at our special women’s section
we have aardvarks and mars bars
and ativan and percodan and
perky cans (of course) but you’ve
no need to look there
you’re special, I mean
I think you’re really something
stop pawing me up and down now
I don’t give a fuck if you’re Italian
just keep your eyes peeled
for that secret move
watch it: I can poke
just like you

I’m somebody’s fun-time girl
Somebody’s knick-knack
Somebody’s cake
Hi, I’m the boss’s girlfriend
I’m curved like the inside of a bowl looking outwards
I’m hanging on a rack
Laden with ornaments
A pussy float for rotting garb
Pleased to meet you, my style
Inside I’m tepid like a runny Sunday
Ever present in glossy tint
I am a steel spike glinting

I feel like I want to know something about you, to know what is about you, your limbs, but it’s really more subtle than that, this something. To know what it’s like you in me. Perhaps because you’re the first to show me some kindness, some kind of. And me, I am very compassionate. I see those things, behind your face, I talk and when I say things, I try to make them real things, and I don’t think about them too much, I spill them from my gut, lay them before you and think you’re smart enough to pick through.

I like it when to see you watching me, the things I do, the odd things and normal things, but in my way I do them and to know that you notice, you see that I see. But it’s so much more subtle than that, even all this description gives it more weight than usually it has. In truth, it’s not a spellbinding, or lightning or love, or a hundred other fifty carefully selected words. In truth, it’s nothing, less than nothing, a minute of someone’s forty-two minutes, a minutiae, a dead pet, a lost friend, a split-end, etc. Something everybody has, sort of knows, but doesn’t pay its due attention. Maybe love is just extended curiosity, desire just a question, a need to know. But what happens when the questions are answered is that the reason for divorce.

When you hear it crinkle, walk down the road with a face like a summer moon. Stop and look right before crossing the street. Let the waft of strangers’ scent intrude you. Inhale last night’s rabid sex and curry to remind you that the second person isn’t so bad, you. They are crinkle-cracked and slain, but so you are. A handful of hurts like a monsoon of petals: say hello to them, say no to them: wrap you up in clear plastic and you say a prayer for lust. When you hear the double-headed helix, over-dramatize. Make noises with your mouth, suck-pumping out the air.

A horrible distance in the person-wide gulf suddenly between you, like he got sucked backwards in a vortex into which you cannot follow. Like one moment you’re sweet cupcakes and the next you’re days old broccoli, shriveling and yellowed by that vacant look; where just then your body was cream-glazed, sticky and warm, inviting, it is now repellent; where his hands, once feverishly intent on traveling, now rest smugly in his pockets pointing away from you, his chest pulled back, his body sidestepping you, his breath avoiding you, his toes turned out. And you say hey, remember me? the girl you just fucked?

This distance, he says, I want to put it between us right now; I don’t even want to think about our link. The invisible dotted line that connects us is a hindrance to my state and I want to put some things in the way, to cloud your line of sight—I don’t even want to think about the couch and the books and the architecture that now stand—I just want them there between us, widening the space from when I first laid eyes on you to when I didn’t. I was happy to put my dick in you just then, but now it’s different: my dick retreats, my arms retract, my everything to be away from you, to whiteout even the trace of a memory of your hole.

Listen, I’m not the marrying kind, but if you don’t leave a tip on the nightstand at least endeavor to be kind as you go.

Smack lips like stranger’s thighs, incipient in attitude like a hush of streets. Emboldened by catwalks, she listens, shoots up a naughty finger and bends at the knees. One, two. A simple shot, a plan to leave the noose hanging ready for the plunge. Next to the noose, a bible. Because we all want to believe that it was right. Beside that, a naughty schoolboy, dressed in leather chaps and vagabond slims, his long sharp arms like a giant’s razorblades; he does a half-circle, in roller skates, rolls over toward the painful side, cuts through the mediocre and there he stops, with time he thinks. I don’t know about the next night, but once, when the plane was propped up beside the building, we all knew it was new magic. I heard the boy had a hairstyle like a mother’s braid.

a lot of people want to have things done to them
manipulated in specific by the hands of others

a lot of willing people means a lot of ready hands
if not skillful

a lot of people want to mash you like potatoes lovingly
without kitchen instruments or clothes

a lot of people want your skin on skin, your dirty rashes
a lot of people probing rarely ever hissing no

I’m in PANK with the tenderness. I feel glowing and squirmy like a string of orgasms.

I felt a pulse too, or two, for the others like Geordie deBoer’s (I mean, what a great fuckin’ name) and Mark Cunningham’s. I like a voice unfamiliar that swiftly teaches you how it’s read. Carolyn Kegel’s uses two phrases that radiated through me: ‘small and unclean’ and ‘water circling and vanishing’.

I’m not going to lie, PANK: I kinda love you. And baby, I know that unlike so many others you’re not wishing I’d never said it or thinking it’s just post-coitalpublishing bliss talk.

I am busily drowning my sorrows, putting back of hand to forehead, leaning back and exclaiming woe. My dress is pretty, you should see it.

Meanwhile, on the very Red Fez there’s a good and new thing I wrote some months back this year.

You’ve never read it before. (Well, except you: but you forcibly read all my stuff and you don’t remember any of it anyway so read it again. I like it when you tell me I’m demanding. Obviously I am not.)

There’s another thing you haven’t read there, by the mysterious and enigmatic Ms Roberta Lawson and probably some more too.

I think it’s good that your eyes have to hurt a little, don’t be a flan. Slam it back, pound the table and go, man.

stupid in self-portrait came
haughty, ripe with asking
rocked an illiterate disorder
ideas flew
said I’m a pink piano
an orgasm, I mean organ
cocked an anemic wink
dried out in stupid clothes
battled the wicker
waved hi to the nomads
smiled, set traps
thought about the afternoons
cut things in quarters
noses
déjalo quieto que no es tuyo

Not many chicks on BULL Men’s Fiction which is fucked as I can’t think of anything more exciting than a bunch of strange men leering.

I gave them a little something for their fourth PDF issue. I think they liked it because they called me a ‘bonus’ and you know how desperately I yearn for male approval.