down in me

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.