[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Myers.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Sex

Maybe he only took his dick out and the rest of him was clothed except for my mouth a receptacle trained to put the light through. Be at the beach one day for me to find you. Place your dick in my mouth none too gently in my mouth all witness. Take off your shoes and socks we’re going on a rough sex with strangers date.

The Worm

Put pushing back on the list of terms we keep. I had a small cup of coffee this morning. I couldn’t access the Internet. In public the sky’s twenty percent off after you came in my mouth at the hot springs I felt great. The worm I decorate with found metal. It’s a city all eyes fingers skin and money.

Copley Square

I never had a we I could believe in. Movies of pigeons shitting are better or worse than the actual pigeons better or worse don’t mean different things in Copley Square the pigeons expect scraps though I do love a good farmer’s market a nice cool breeze flowers and a church under construction. A man on a banner wears sunglasses. This banner hangs down from the front of the church like a booger. The flowers in the public garden are white and orange with red leaves and cup-shaped and flying and wearing sunglasses with fluorescent orange rims and soldiers poverty and wars and aging. What are ways to endure disgrace?

Moving

Everything I have is assigned a lot number and it’s hard not to feel I’m in a bad production of Phantom of the Opera. My history wears a wet dress cold on the cold damp skin of November. The cardboard game board has dragons but the waterways haven’t been colored in.

Asking where the treasure is buried

A cat licked clean. I rouged my skin today before I ate the chocolate pudding which catches the cold back of my spoon. The ceramic bowls I made in therapy hold only fingerprints. It takes twenty minutes or the smell of dad’s cherry pipe tobacco flavor. Smoke which never smelled like cherry but I learned to read the package.

You’re smoking and doing something with your phone and because I’ve just met you I ignore you. It’s not because I’ve just met you it’s because I’m attracted and I just quit smoking myself. I feel fear feel chopped up like an ingredient for a Cobb salad.

German phrases and until last the verb it’s so humid on the east coast leaving, and how sticky the mess of melted frozen yogurt that was spilled into the child safety lock mechanism of our minivan, a blue Dodge caravan if I can trust the first day of school pictures. Dried shut, that lock never worked again no matter how much care was demonstrated. I wish I could take out all the time we spend apart on you at night until our orgasms exhaust us. Nothing can explain the luck everything reminds me of analogously of almost everything else. It was boring to add mirrors. I cut my finger open trying to spin my body around in your mouth like a plum.

The sneeze from being out in the sun is a gorgeous seed in my belly. I suppose I told him that I was open to anything and who better than me, suggesting that he kiss me. I went to bed early one night and you knocked.

I imagined your dick inside me like a popsicle, a thick goosebump, e-mails to which the only interesting answer is yes.

I drive my car with no gas and no money and buy my work clothes at the Camp Hill mall and eat a pretzel from the Auntie Anne’s I used to work at when I was a high school girl.

Now that we live together I think the red lining is what sold me. I believe in change I feel like an underfeather, the kind shed in summer grown back in fall for birds living through more than one season. I like painting the gluey primer with you how it makes sex sounds when we slop it on its thickness in the humidity in the summer in the kitchen in the brush then down my arm.

I take dried shark fin up the ass so it kicks in faster. I was stoned at Tufts when gay marriage passed in Massachusetts. Gay men can’t tell me that shame doesn’t have anything to do with us. Will you be with me in the garden of ceramic roses, honor, the sky brass talking? As we were putting up our first bookshelf in Jamaica Plain there was an earthquake. A gay German flower boy for your wedding I’m jealous!

Though I did get a teapot in the mail meant as a wedding present for someone else and meanly kept it, my teeth rattling around in there like red hard candies. You were right about the coffee shop and about maps.

My autobiography, 2012

I could never be a housewife; My bodice is metal enough to attract lightning. I chose to write in this house, because we moved into it when my father was making more money, makes me feel retroactive. My dad and I are alone in the house. This is rare. My mom is usually around but this week she’s in Albuquerque visiting my older sister and her family. My dad watches baseball but not aggressively.

I grew up here in the suburbs of Harrisburg near Three Mile Island, but now I live with Brian in Boston. Where people are around me all day like a chalk that I try to ignore is on my hands but I use my hands a lot. The closest river to me growing up was the Conodoguinet, about which I wrote a poem:

I see crayfish in it and
it smells good and bad in
the summer we go wading.

I wish I could say I wrote this poem when I was a child but I just wrote it. I like to be in my bare feet in the mess of it. Is enunciated the opposite of pale? A web the opposite of hollow?

Why I eat poetry

You have your eyes shut like a gossip magazine glued shut by a fan’s cum. Alone with travel, like wind. The summer we started dating we couldn’t find any good vegetarian food and I got shy in all these sentences so used to breaking.

The poem the movie

Slowly in like the smell of hot cotton candy on a hot day into the noses of those on the benches metaphorical with drug use. I want to be closer. Picture the face I’m wearing picture the shirt I’m taking off the one with the thin black close together stripes around the front and the circles too which clash against the stripes like the texture of plastic on plastic arrogant as a couple in love.

I don’t know anything about cruising

Rectangles and triangles of icing. Your rent in ginger and protein. A red biblical and shiny scrotum given an injury. Mine all of it because I will not feed you my dick I’ll just tease you on the neighborhood in bed. Those balls between thick panes of glass having been pressed then sucked at until lame.

Movement cleans the trees and rain leaves a heavy wig but not as fake. I did my best to see what shame could mean again this writing keeps track for free. No one is as handsome as our unsettling one another the way orgasm and chiasmus can fleece. My jealous face tattles on itself no need. I put myself out like an empty mason jar a hoped-for milk that steps in.

The city in its long blue shirt, my asshole luxuriates

When I can see better I see you choose to enjoy yourself with me at the lush of vowels. Their seat I don’t want anything as badly as an edge. Rough if I am impressionable smooth as a duck in water. Its small leisure.

Tame me like a rat in a swamp

The worm is back and still too young to be a fairy tale. The worm is back the way a romance novel always was in my mom’s hands and in the silver drawer too. A shadow sly and swollen and ripe with masturbation formally more than halfway.

I still have years of drinking behind me like a dangerous crown. The way the trees were turning around for me as I watched them out the windows of the Dodge looking to be buried in hills as if you should have seen them long ago found me and recused me from this experience of myself. Jackrabbits pump sticky ejaculations into the dandelions ballooning smoking holding.

Affording Chinese sweet buns and butterfly cakes and car insurance all at the same time washing bits of hot sauce off of the kitchen floor before a party still unformed as cooling fudge how I left New York after the semester was a thumb in a wet mouth. Beers on knees I insert myself into you at the softest part of your throat how I think a necklace would. I left New York the wind on my shoulders.

How else to kiss a bivalve. I grew up like a minnow trying to be a tadpole too many shades of green. In whose back pocket a just in case condom thumbs peeling like overturned boats talking their way slowly into pants both kinds of pants.

My nails grow quickly is getting specific though I go to the bank and press lots of buttons and though I no longer masturbate so feverishly. In Idaho we see bighorn sheep and your beard is like a kiss I feel my tits through my shirt we take cover under a stone I wouldn’t be able to imagine it now without your having done it first.

The sweet oily strawberry on a plate and fingered when I want to be picked up this bad and this many times different colors of candies but matte slipping like memory in the wheelhouse different so fast. Please going ahead with our orders.

Standing invitation

Just down the street the young
horizon’s inadvertence.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Mickelson.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Say you have a daughter who’s a junior in high school. Say she is head
of the homecoming committee making floats. Say they decide on a float
where the school mascot, the Pioneer, shoots their rivals the Wolves.
Say she tells you she needs several colors of crepe. Say you promise
to pick it up. Say before making the Party City parking lot, you drive twenty-eight miles over the state line.

*
No need to be careful about rumpling your clothes because your wife works swing.
You have hours to be here.

*
Dinner’s late, lately come to this, the kiss starting at the door. Two figures in bed :
sliced white bread : two slices of toast spread with raspberry jam.

*
Say you tie me to my bed with your neckties, the ones
you’ve been given for Easter : for anniversaries.
The ones you no longer wear.
Right hand canary yellow.
Left foot red.

*
Would it bother you to sleep with men so young if you’d had sons?

*
The school’s colors are royal blue and gold.

*
my lancet: my little numb
my lead vest of want.

*
Together, let’s unbox and build scale models of defeat.

*
The last wolf seen in the county
was killed by a local resident in 1928.

*
Say you love to watch me lost in how you paint me with your tongue.
Say you love to watch yourself enter the first time and the next and the next.
Say you love to watch me watch you when you shove your fingers in my mouth.

*
Let me pluck your feathers one
by one. I’ll wear the green ones in my
hat. Let me pose you naked room by room.

*
Tell me of the others, the ones
you fuck in hotel rooms, the ones
who suck you off in your Camry
because they can’t explain
you in their dorm rooms : to their friends.

*
Say your daughter tells you, for a ’90s retro feel,
the homecoming dance will be decked out
in silver and teal.

*
The roles we play : the roleplay.
Home invasion when you strike my face,
grab my hair, shove me to the floor
and stick your gun in my mouth.

*
The ways we part: the lips : like ships. How you slip and share small details
of your day, the way she calls you and tells to buy one more item.

*
Every weekend’s strictly family time.

*
My suture : my tender stitch
my newly human shield.

I brand myself on the knee with the teeth of a comb

To grow the hair & legs of a centauress

The battering of hooves & churning of cud in my throat stuffed with the Lord like

A window

A blank under my treehouse weeds torn by boys & girls I dream of

Spearing

Thunderbolt that snaps a candy green field I am breasted with

The wings of baby Jesus

Not yet a saint not yet a mule not yet a wand not yet Virgin Mary

Not yet the guy who ruptured his colon when fucked by a horse so he could

Gallop across the fertilized plain of this firmament

In which my father is the head & my mother is the neck that pivots

The head

My unicorn torso in a cloud their excretion

Blowing hard on my name in red burning off the saddle on my bare

Back

My pearl horn a shot fired

Straight through the brain

for Travis Casey

You were the book I had opened. All the birds in the aviary died trying to escape, to soar back to you. I tied a message to a pigeon’s leg with orange ribbon. I hate that color, how it reminds me of sunsets, fruit and other things Mama insists I enjoy. It was your favorite. You spit on the other patients from my balcony, confident you would never hit the mark.

I tried to read but the words coalesced into black railroad spikes. I wanted to cut your throat and wear your bloody Superman shirt home to Mama and my sandbox friends as proof. I wanted to climb your great heights, savor air so thin you doubt the existence of oxygen, the existence of God.

After a long sleep in Cracktown, I remember nothing but a kiss on the stairwell and the hookers across the street, unshaven men making drug deals beside a Dumpster. The world is a bonfire encased in glass. Had I shown you the way out, perhaps your would have shown me the way in.

I collected the dead birds-the canaries, the storks, the hummingbirds-and stuffed them inside a garbage bag, then raced the streets like a deranged Santa, calling your name.

My bookmark fell apart in the rain, the ink smearing like blood. Jared, the man you chose after me, adored the rain. He let it pour over his curls and dimpled cheeks, arms outstretched like Christ. We had enough for a cross. We had enough for a cabin. You could pull the splinters from my thumb. You cannot love unless you’re willing to bleed.

Like an addict’s hope for salvation, my father dropped dead in a Wal-Mart parking lot. No one stole his food. Afterward, I devoured men bent on self-destruction, and I won’t stop until the dirt welcomes my bones.

I continued the book after deciphering the jumbled text. The novel was tragic; our three weeks together were an illusion. Pick a card, any card, and I will collapse in grief. It’s easy to mourn a man never yours. Ask Mama. The dead know more than the living, but they are bitter and stingy like Christian wives.

The birds began to rot. I carried the bag, still shouting your name, now a mantra. I imagined all the men moaning it, especially Jared in the rain. May the birds peck out his eyes.

When you charmed me into your bedroom, I said yes. You might never have asked again.

Another aviary resides in a strip mall across town. If I flew away, I could not return. I am homeless, I am therefore heartless.

You wanted to taste me, the first thing you said after our long, languorous kiss. But I am rancid like meat. I should join the birds. We could have made a home among the feathers, the blood, the glassy eyes. Bonds created inside this iron fence hum with intensity but never last. Fall in love anyway, Mama said.

I reached the final page. The heroine killed herself. So did the birds. You will not last-blind luck will carry you to the River Styx. There, you must cross or drown. Bribe the rower with cash or suck his cock.

I was seduced. I was willing. We sat on the balcony, smoked menthol cigarettes and ridiculed the poor bastards passing through the courtyard. I felt invincible and filthy like a cockroach.

Jared admired birds migrating over my room. Such perfect formation, he said. How can you not believe in God? You fucked him not long after I kissed his throat. Don’t pin your happiness on a dying man. You always lose. Ask Mama.

Ask me.

I sought revenge, righteous and naive. Enraged, your degrade me: meth whore, freak, psychotic. I thought of my parents. I don’t miss my father.

I went to Mama’s house. There were two photos of you on her computer, waiting for me. I deleted them at night while the birds slept in the second aviary. The dark hours were mine.

We never spent the night together. Now we do not speak. I slung the bag of dead birds into a Dumpster. A startled caw jolted me. Unexpected life. I walked away.

Soon, we will not know one another.

Some men carry erasers and some carry memories. It’s not his decision-it’s like height or eye color.

I chase men into the grave. Except for winter, birds sing their mocking melody. They have escaped. We will not.

your used jeep is the first thing we ride in. tunneling your town, two girls, july air coming through windows. your system loud as it could go. rattling truck doors. gnats determined to escape summer, catch our mouths during laughs. styrofoam cups of lemonade flung out open windows come back to kiss our cheeks. a single hand on the wheel, the other bent for the smoking thing in your mouth, your thigh close to my thigh, the space between skin made holy by every pothole we tripped over beneath us.

when i am alone with myself, a pillow between me and a mechanic thing going fast for my clitoris, when i am alone with myself, humping pillows like a maniac teenage boy, imagining my ass squeezing in and out of you so anxious i cannot wait for you, those times when the holy space is between my middle part and muffled vibration- i hate you for reducing me to this. i want to scream your name to you and break your spine in parts. i want you face down before me to make an altar of your back, hurt you for every time you’ve hurt me– the men you’ve been with openly, the men in photographs you show me. i want to kill you: one hand around your neck, another pulling you down into me and scream at you for not loving me. the women you fuck in secret. i am bored with the sanctimonious.

harlem, 1989 i am wearing a favorite dress, and my grandmother is dead. cousins remind me to say hello to my great grandmother buried just below the daughter they are lowering on top of her. just enough dirt before they pack my grandmother in- how they fit her fat body in that box. the cold earth separating mother from daughter– even in death women are not allowed to touch. i think it must be religious- that dirt- forbidding them reunion. what would become of my great grandmother’s hand, what, if she stretched it through her death box and past the holy space to rub her only daughter’s back?

charleston, 1994 relatives have forced me into a dress. white gloved old women fan me, but i am not crying. in the casket, they’ve forced Nana into a virgin’s costume. she looks like an elderly bride. i pray silver sequins for me and Nana, cheap, lopsided strings of pearls. they’ve stuffed one side of her bra with tissue paper to pad the cup. i remember washing the holy space, the valley of diseased breast removed, where cancer grew until she was shaven head and poisoned apple. the summer i spent dressing her wound, gauze soaked with blood and pus before i could reach for tape. her sad apple of a head lowered. her body leaning out into the world toward its missing part.

i download pictures you send me: an ass hanging out of red underwear two breasts in a red push-up. i want to reply to the email, “i would have preferred black.” you preface your pictures with explanations of positions and postures. you are ashamed despite the digital canopy. i bring my face closer. pixels formatted to screen. no matter how many times i run my hands over it or you, i am reminded of the holy space i cannot touch, the places i cannot reach.

i am looking at our two a.m. texts
you ask me if it’s over
i think of our first ride together
times you told me about those stupid boys
my own husband on top of me
my grandmothers buried like mattress sets
things i love and hate
your face and you among them
beautiful things that hurt me
the vietnamese lady and
her alcohol stuffed cotton balls
smoothed over my eyebrows
the cool of liniment oil after
trusting my sight to her approach
the hot wax spread
the stick as it presses into my forehead
the wall art she makes of my face
she pats the strips in place
settles me before she pulls the paper from my skin
tweezers and scissors to shape the corners
more hot wax over the other eye
beautiful things that hurt me
the holy space between my brows
she applies wax there, too
pulls it from its root
holds it up to the light
inspects it to discard it
like you do my heart, love,
like you do my heart.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Jacobs.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Don’t worry,
it’s just gender dysphoria again.

It’s just changing planets,
like we’re only so far
from the sun as it is:
Why shouldn’t we be unhappy
with these bodies?

I’m not famous enough
to be doing this alone,
but God if I knew any other way
don’t you think I would’ve been the first
in line to abandon this form for a better one?

Yes, there are a few surfaces
that I agree should never be
tattooed; if we’re built like
furry white potatoes
pretending they’re girls
it’s the last thing we want
to overhear:

“Believe me, if I
wasn’t so thrown off
by the shape then
I’d be convinced.”

MAYBE THEN MY BREASTS
ARE ALREADY BIG ENOUGH
FOR A SMALL-BREASTED
WOMAN HUH

Fuck you, we’re not fruit.
Somewhere buried in this stolen wallet
there’s a picture of me with boobs
and bangs down to here,
and I look fucking good.

Listen, I know all about peer confession,
but lately I’ve been content to
crop heads out of photos
and pretend I’m Laura Jane Grace.

I can’t stop shaving my body.
One day it won’t grow back
and all these cuts will heal over.

You’ll whisper, “How can he
let a cock like that go to waste?”
and I’ll answer that I’m sick
of being stuck in this warm orbit
and teasing precum from the tip of your
conversations-can’t we just get this over with?

I want you to go ahead,
PRETEND I’M JUST CONFUSED,
and I’ll pretend
that I’m not
absolutely fucking livid.

At least I’ve got my
fingers and toes

HUMPADORI JACK SING-ALONG

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Vidhu1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Kindly do not forsake this world of jack,
this world, our steady candy in which we don’t do

jack. Is there a one who
would not hang with us, who

would not instant merge, ride up,

and swallow
whole the highs and lows, who
would not sing and stroke the other along, back and forth, along
the spine, along the branes and sticky chords? I only live to sing and learn
to value life and to make sure
everyone gets hurt in the process.
I have seen for myself how everyone has changed. I too have changed
revolving,
accruing overtures, slivers of always everyone. There is not a one
I cannot bear to touch
because I cannot seriously contemplate

life without my natural allies, my supplements, little universes at the smallest possible surface area and skin, damaged boys trickle in, oh-
It’s a matter of positioning, desperate strands and
lots of Bubblu and Tubblu, Harry and Vlad,
who would merge/float/dive/swirl
into guts and codas of Dave and Lev, of Allen and me-jacks of all trades and
patterns
and experiences on the scale of imps and whales who would not swallow
us whole absurdly together, who would not hang
with us, systemically woo
the slightest part, which is also all of us;
I am not thinking of
fractures of backstab distractions, ciphers:
I don’t want to be the type
everyone
wonders about-
no one to violate the bilqul plump shellac
of altogether now
no one villainous in all things, no one falls
out with the sirens, no one cocks alone.

SHIVA, AGAIN AND AGAIN

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Vidhu2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Male thought is my thought. As is Female sprouting a sticky post-
maladiction wig. My lingam wigsome phoenix. Hair on my fingers, prehensile thought inappropros of feathers. Off with your sacerdotal horrors: Wing-pieces, ash-pieces. Why end there-

A salutation, joy in the destroyer, more and more. I part the phoenix.

I part my hair–
My phoenix parted in the center and burning and regrowing hairs on me: Chest hairs, mouth hairs, ash around my fecund mouths-

Pubic sparks!

Ah, hairs on me, always sprouting growing and burning and then growing again.

I part the air, and slowly and whole, a world is born from the corpse, much loved
world I lunge for.

Fizzle that
thought to nothing, I am corpse sliver, and my hair descends and falls, low it falls-river without end. Even when it’s dead I want that world again,

every part.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Hoke.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Here’s how I remember it:  I must have been God knows how old, maybe six or seven, which is funny because I thought of myself as pretty old at the time.  My best friend Jason was visiting from Wisconsin and I wanted him to meet my other best friend Frankie.  Frankie is this kid I used to beat up all the time, as in every day, without exception.  I know this is true because I remember on Valentines Day saying “Hey Frankie, guess what?  Because it’s Valentines Day I’m going to be so nice to you! I won’t hurt you at all today.”  I remember feeling so joyful and proud of my selfless declaration, like when you say “I love you” to someone you’re dating just to make them happy, even though it isn’t true.  I beat him up anyway.  He was my best friend in Miami.

But on this day Jason and I went to Frankie’s house and rang the doorbell, and as soon as he opened the door things went quite awry, as without even saying “hi,” Jason started punching the kid in the stomach, and urging me to do so too.  So I hit him a few times on the arm, and suddenly felt really bad, because Jason seemed to want to hit him more than I did, and I knew there was something wrong about that.  It felt imbalanced.  No one wants to hurt Frankie more than I do. Frankie stood there weeping, his long skinny body bending slightly, but he didn’t move.  We dragged Frankie out onto the grass, and at the time I had this big plastic tractor I rode everywhere; it was awesome.  I was a suburban farmer with my big plastic tractor, full of power and speed, mowing the pavement on the way from my house to Frankie’s.  Well, Jason threw the tractor on top of Frankie and sat on it; the poor kid was crying miserably, and I felt kind of icy, like whoa we’ve gone too far.  My heart wasn’t in it.  You know, I thought maybe the two would get along.  I wanted to apologize to Frankie for this excessive, what’s the word for that, brouhaha maybe, but instead I said, “Jason, we really should go, I think maybe it’s lunch time.”  I didn’t want to seem uncool.

When I was eight we moved to Wisconsin, and ended up living down the street from Jason and his mom, who my mom was very close to.  My mom has all these stories about how Jason was bossy and controlling, which she repeats like she’s on autopilot when she and I drink together now.  I guess he used to tell me exactly what to do, and I would quietly do it, without questions.  She says he invented a game where he would play with Star Wars dolls on his bed.  He told me his bed was hot, and if I touched it, I’d get burned.  So I watched him play Star Wars, and whenever I had the urge to touch one, he’d scold me, saying, “No!  It’s hot, what did I say?”  And my hand would drop quickly back down. What I remember though is I used to ask him if we could make the dolls pass out, like faint. I couldn’t even say the words. I’d say, can we do that thing? And he’d have one doll hit the other on the back of the head, knock him out. And I remember I would get wet when he did that; I didn’t even know what that feeling was I just knew I liked it. The doll had to be a certain kind of vulnerable to make it happen.

When we drink together my dad says, “I actually think we taught you to be too nice of a kid.  We wanted you to be good and kind, you know, our little angel-you were pretty cute-and so we taught you to share with other kids.  We thought it was important; I mean it seemed important. But you did what we said almost too well.”  He tells me this story.  When I was seven, my dad and his friend Doug used to watch me and Doug’s daughter Helen on weekends, while our mothers went to work.  The two men sat on the side of a sandbox while Helen and I built castles and forts.  Apparently Helen called me names and hit me the whole time-she would punch me on the leg and pinch me-to which I would respond pleasantly and thoughtfully.  You know, “Please don’t say that, it hurts my feelings,” that sort of thing.  Or, “I wish you wouldn’t punch my leg.”  My dad said, “Doug just sat there and didn’t say a thing to his daughter.  I couldn’t believe it!  He thought she was perfect, but she was a brat.  Nothing special about her!  Finally I said to you, ‘If Helen hits you again you have my permission to hit her back.  Hit her as hard as you can. Just go for it!’  You had this look! You were so excited, and you said, ‘Okay Dad, I certainly will.’  That stopped her real quick.  I look back and wonder if I should have said that to you more often. Just deck her. Punch her, for the love of God.”

My mom, when she gets drunk she gets into a groove with certain stories, and I hate all of them. She says, “You had that creepy friend Liz in Wisconsin, man, she was a weird one.  I never knew what to do with that.  You seemed to like her, but she made me nervous.”  Liz was three years older than me, and at that time I guess I was anywhere from eight to ten years old.  We played long involved imaginative games that lasted the entire day.  I remember a lot of times kings were involved, and whoever was king ruled over the other.  Most of the time she was king.  We battled with swords, and I’d end up dying, and she’d say, “You’re dead so you have to lay still.”  So I’d lie still on the ground, and my job was to not respond while she lay on top of me.  Eventually my mom told me I couldn’t be her friend anymore.  “Liz was older than you and she was manipulative.  I should have told you to deck that girl.  I think we raised you to be too nice.”  But what I remember is lying so so still, pretending I was dead, hoping I could be dead forever, while she lay on top of me.  When we stopped being friends, she lurked in our side yard, staring up at my bedroom window, while I looked outside, my skin on fire.

When I was in sixth grade we moved from Wisconsin to Swarthmore, PA.  I lived there for seven years, until I graduated high school.  My mom says, “I don’t know what happened to you in Swarthmore, but you were suddenly so shy I thought we had a ghost for a daughter.  Your eighth grade teacher said he worried more about you than anyone; that you might be forever lost.  I think he was the only teacher who cared about you at all.”  This is an elusive statement that I don’t ask her to clarify.  I hate this conversation.  She says, “There were so many personalities in that class of yours, teachers never paid any attention to you.  We got report cards that said, ‘Pleasure to have in class’ every time.  They thought you were a pleasure because you required no attention like the other kids in your grade.  There were sixty kids on the suicide list, for one thing. They had a suicide list!  I think they were happy to have just this one kid they didn’t have to work for.”  And this is another topic my parents bring up every single time I see them, over bottles and bottles of wine. There’s no end to the wine we drink. Why does she always bring up the fucking suicide list is what I want to know, but apparently not that badly, since I never ask her. She says, “You were the only kid in your class NOT in the gifted program, do you remember that?  Do you remember how you and that brain-dead kid Billy had to sit in the back of the class and get extra tutoring?” Billy was mentally retarded, not brain-dead, but who’s splitting hairs here?  “And I found out later it was because you refused to take your placement test.  You got bored midway, and decided filling in circles was a waste of time.  So you didn’t.  You got a 48% score, and I thought, ‘Well, I guess she just isn’t that smart.’  You know, some kids aren’t.”

+

It was in college that I started dating women. I chose my girlfriends carefully; I wanted someone I knew would shake me up.  I felt empty, silent; I don’t know how to explain it. I had slept with a few women, each of whom told me they loved me, even though I felt nothing in return.  I felt sick of myself, my stomach burning with the only intensity I could feel-shame-while I hurled myself on top of my dates, grasping at shirts, belts, desperate to feel something. I felt like some kind of terrible, lesbian demon.  I remember one date asking me to please slow down: “just because we’re kissing doesn’t mean we have to fuck,” she suggested, which was weird. Another woman thanked me for petting her hair, briefly, on my way out the door, and I felt ashamed of that too, how little I respected her. And I remember this other girl crying-we were next to a waterfall that roared loudly and because of this she cried in silence-just shaking and crying.  She leaned close and grabbed at my arms and whimpered, “Why can’t I just love you?”  I felt pathetic and repulsed holding onto her.  “Because you can’t,” I said.  I needed to feel some kind of burn. I needed to find someone who loved and hated me more than I loved and hated myself.

I don’t know how to bring it up.  Of course she never hit me.  We had rules.  At night I would get into bed after Cyndy and pull her shirt up over her head quickly, clasp it around her wrists.  Mostly tying her hands together was playful, as was holding her shoulders down roughly with my arms while fucking, or her forcibly dangling me half off the bed so the blood would rush to my head until I coughed and felt faint and begged her to let me back up.  One night as we wrestled in bed after arguing passively all day I moved to kiss her and felt a lurching angry hurt tense my lungs and throat.  I kissed her like I hated her, like kissing her was the meanest thing a person could do.  I wanted, for a second, to mash her face in with my mouth.  She pulled away.  “No mean kisses,” she said.  My face burned.

After we broke up I wanted to tell my mom, “Really, it wasn’t good,” but the best I could get was taking down all the pictures of the two of us from the walls in my parent’s house.  I did this under the guise of my brother’s weird behavior.  “Simon had to take down all the pictures of Sheila,” my mom said, shrugging, like my brother’s your regular nutjob.  “He said she was evil and can’t exist in picture form.”  “Uh huh,” I said, ripping open the back of her black stained hardwood frame. “It’s a little like that.”

But at the time I thought she was fantastic.  She was the first girl I really fell for.  She had bright sparkly green eyes and an open smile.  She was a dancer and had majestic strength, and absolute control over her body, such that when she walked, she seemed to command an invisible personal force.  Like drawn depictions of baby Jesus in pop art, she seemed to emit dynamic energy in a ten-foot radius around her soft, lean body.  When we hugged I felt as though I fell through her, that with my chin snuggled into her neck, my eyes could see out the back of her head.  I was like a stick of butter melted into a piece of toast.  Eventually, everyone else perceived us that way too.  I started getting communal emails from friends.  People referred to us You Two.

She said, “I have to get their phone numbers, otherwise they’ll think I’m gay.”  We were at a hostel in Prague.  Sitting in the communal kitchen, eating dinner, Cyndy flirted with the guy sitting next to her while I silently ate the spaghetti I cooked for dinner.  I tried getting his attention, acting like I might have interest in him, to broadcast that it didn’t bother me to be excluded.  I both knew and couldn’t believe she would sleep with other people when she could have me, and was determined to out-compete anyone who tried.  Later, I asked her, “Why not just say you don’t like them?  Just because you’re not attracted to every guy you meet, that doesn’t make you seem gay.”  She looked at me with pity and said, “But it does. The problem is that it’s so obvious when I look at you how much I love you.  It radiates.  Everyone can see it, and then they’ll know we’re together.”  She flashed me an intense dreamy look, almost watery, like a perfect reflection of the moon in a still pool.  I had to blink.  “Okay,” I said.

We told each other absolutely everything.  She told me her dreams and desires; we talked about art and the creative pulse of every rock, tree, or seemingly unwanted fallen leaf around us; we talked about how we had never felt this purely connected with anyone else.  I told her about growing up, playing arm wrestling games with my brother, wild pillow fights I used to have with my cousins, and fake wrestling tournaments I created with the neighborhood kids.  I told her about Frankie and Jason, and the time Jason crushed him under the tractor.  Her smile could shift in an instant.  “You’re a violent person.  Your stories really scare me,” she said, dropping my hand.  She told me that when she was young she went to an alternative school, where they sat on the floor in a circle and never used desks.  “I was taught to live peacefully,” she told me on those occasions.  “I’m surprised that you weren’t.”

But I was, wasn’t I?  Wasn’t I raised peacefully?  Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about all this time?

Listen, let’s sit down.  Sit down and relax, we’ve got the whole night to talk about this.  Pour a drink.  No, like a big one in a big cup. Yeah just leave the bottle. And whatever there’s a whole other box where that came from. Box wines: they’re making them really good these days. Like, who needs glass when you’ve got a whole box?

When we drink my parents tell me dueling stories about how I was as a kid: serious, quiet, goofy.  And it’s interesting because I have my own memories-we all do-and yet I get drawn in by these weird mythic impressions of theirs, which are like the crazed technicolor versions of mine. Apparently, when I was really little my dad and I used sit side by side on the couch and watch The Gong Show together.  Comedians would get on stage and perform mercilessly awful talent-show-esque stunts, a sort of American Idol with an intentionally wry sense of humor, and I would furrow my brow, squinting at the stage while the performance went on.  The family lore here is after each performance I would turn to my dad and sternly inform him: “They really should gong that guy.  He’s just not good.”  During parent-teacher conferences my elementary school teachers told my parents they worried over my lack of a sense of humor.  She’s wound up tightly, the teachers explained, she won’t laugh.

I was in the sixth grade when my family moved from the sleepy town in icy Wisconsin to the intellectually intense college town of Swarthmore. My classmates were the precocious children of Swarthmore College professors and biochemical engineers. My young friends took the 99^th percentile seriously; I remember obsessing over whether my #2 pencil was sharp enough to make a dent.  In fifth grade one friend explained to me earnestly that she would never have children, because she had read plenty of studies showing that parents are likely to raise their children exactly the way they were raised.  “That makes good sense,” I told her, thoughtfully, and vowed the same. In seventh grade this same friend pronounced that she wanted to kill herself by the age of 23; she maintained an eerie certainty that life would go irreparably downhill at exactly that juncture. In 7th grade my teachers cancelled our monthly dance held in the local church because the most popular kids kept showing up drunk; in 8^th grade a classmate wandered onto the train tracks drunk in the middle of the night and got hit by a train (he lived, he lost an arm); in 9^th grade another friend attempted suicide and was sent away, somewhere-who knew where away was?; in 10^th grade a friend was known to “drink alone” which we all knew was “the unhealthy way to drink.” There was a list, damn it, a suicide list my mom reminds me-over and over again she reminds me-and she doesn’t slur her words when she drinks: she says it clearly. Life isn’t safe.

When Cyndy and I broke up, it was kind of quiet. We were loud, so loud all those years together: screaming during sex, screaming during fights, banging doors shut, throwing things. One of the times she cheated, I broke her favorite cd in half with my hands and hurled it at her head; I was trying to blind her the way I felt blind, sear the tears out of her eyes the way mine felt hot streaming down. But when we broke up, finally, it just sort of happened. I helped her pack, she helped me. We nodded, we waved. I remember the sun gleamed her blond hair a golden orange when she left and I remember the way her jeans matched the blue pavement so her legs sort of melted into the road. She just, left. She walked away.

Their madness really did, at least, have the most perfect ears. Ruth Ann and Ira remarked on this phenomenon often, at first. Eventually they reverted to their usual conversations about their dinner plans, friends they rarely saw, and all the poor boring straight married women, but these conversations felt different after they created the madness, as if each line they spoke were a verbalized moment of silence in memory of the madness’ perfect pink ears.

They never argued anymore about whose turn it was to buy cotton swabs. The cotton swabs in their apartment were always overstocked.

Receipts lying around the house read, mince garlic / brocc bunch lb 1.2 / cott swab, or prescrip xan / lem lozenge / cotton sw, or even 9.4 gal unleaded @ 3.99 gal / cot swob. It seemed that the cotton swabs were always the last items scanned, as if whichever woman was making the grocery or pharmacy or gas station purchase felt unwilling to give up their gift for the madness, even for a moment to the cashier. The cotton swabs were sometimes normal and sometimes jumbo, sometimes 100-packs and sometimes 500-packs, but neither woman ever bought the cotton swabs with the pink plastic middles, which would have made the situation too perfect to stand.

During one of their monthly trips to the bar, Ira drank too many rum and Sprites and let slip to Ruth Ann how she felt disappointed when she saw that Ruth Ann had bought the off-name cotton swabs again, the ones that always gave way in the middle. Ruth Ann got defensive for a quarter of a second, enough time for their one remaining mutual friend from college to make a joke about Lesbian Bed Death that killed all conversation for the next quarter hour.

That night before bed, the two women found all of the cotton swabs in the apartment and stacked them in the madness’ cabinet below the sink so that they would be more easily able to see how many were left and stop buying so many boxes unnecessarily. The madness barely fit in the cabinet. Neither Ruth Ann nor Ira mentioned the madness, the friend from college, or any small frustration either one had with the other for four nights, instead playing Monopoly or a complicated card game and then having sex, no matter who won.

Every night they started in a different position, even when they had eaten a heavy dinner or Ira had sprained her wrist and it was raining. They pretended not to hear the madness whining from the bathroom. It was in their passion, after all, that they had forgotten to leave out a midnight snack, and that sort of forgetfulness can always be forgiven.

Bed Death? Ruth Ann planned to shout on the morning of the fifth day. They would laugh together and make pancakes, and that night, the women would rest.

If the madness whined at the foot of their bed, Ruth Ann would hit it with the lamp.