The Artist

She was an artist. She was an artist in the most enticing of forms. She could paint a picture in your mind with her body. She could recall to your chest the feeling of a thousand legions of sex. She was a drug. She was the cruel bite of whiskey on your tongue after you were done with your binge, or were you just taking a breath? She was beautiful. She was an artist. 

In the realm of club dancers and cage dancers and pole dancers and the go-gos in the big boots, the spikes, the glitter, the grotesque mask on the desires of a woman in order to taper to the desires of men, she didn’t wear a mask because she wore nothing. She was honest and so she was an artist.

She could awaken in you the kind of respect for the female form that makes a good man say “Amen.” She was reminiscent of the goddess, or was the goddess reminiscent of her? She had within her, withon her, without her, flaws and scars, marks of beauty and marks of anger, but she drew your eyes to them as though they were brush strokes and not as though they needed to be hidden. 

She was a woman. She was a woman. She was an artist because she was a woman.

She refused to be plated in glass, she refused to be guarded by stern-faced men, she refused to let them take their pictures, she would not let living and breathing reenactment of creation be placed within a museum, and so she ran. 

In her running she found nothing. In her running she found cheap. In her running she tripped over plastic, plastic, paper and plastic, flimsy promises and cheap, cheap sex. 

And no one ever saw that she was an artist. 

So no one ever saw that she was a woman.

Blood-Red Dictionary

Clutching at the dictionary with blood red hands, if you hold me up to the light you see a lot more red these days, more blood, less water, but more blood means more ways to bleed. Holding the dictionary to my chest willing it to transfer over the sentiments to make myself understood, where are my words? I am Queen of Words but my subjects have been rebelling. I am the Marie Antoinette of the Thesaurus and no longer does anyone answer to me, I come up for air from extravagance needing the comfort of spell check, and I hate spell check. I can’t write him a love letter if it doesn’t make sense because I fear more than anything not making any sense to him. 

The dictionary I brought out of a box in order to draw around him more boxes. I keep a lot of things contained, boxes and bags, I pack up and then unpack, when was the last time I could call a place home? 

Blood red hands on a blood-soaked dictionary, God help me make sense, God help us make sense, I can’t lose all my sense anymore, I can’t wander like this anymore.

I unpack and re-pack but unpacking takes less time, pieces of me in boxes, pieces of me in bags. Stories here, scars there, masses of flesh and the bloody heaving past of a girl that never wanted anything except to give everything she had and receive back the same, she read too many books, she broke too many times, she knew God too well. 

Every single fucking piece of me I deliver into his hands every single day. What I have left to clutch I clutch and so I clutch the dictionary. I recite to myself,

“Anticipate. Verb. Regard as probable; expect or predict.

Anticipation: A Carly Simon song too often relevant to my situation.

Reciprocate: Respond to a gesture or action with a corresponding one. Experience the same feeling for one as they feel for the other.

Reciprocation: What we’re all fucking waiting for.”

There are no words to make him understand in this gaddam book. 

But the dictionary says I don’t love him because it’s easy. The dictionary says it’s easy because I love him.

Restaurant Observation 2

She asked that the food be “to go” but she ate it there at the sushi counter in my presence. Was she indecisive, confused, had she changed her plans, or did she just prefer the comfort of the flimsy plastic bowl?

            She was a woman, so she baffled me anyway, no matter.

            I watched her eat in silence and thought of all the women I had ever known. The women who had hurt me, the women I had hurt. I thought of my mother’s bruised face, my father’s fist. I thought of my ex-wife’s bruised face, my fist.

            I observed her, young and unscathed, beautiful and careless. My hands I used to rub my temples. The pads of my fingers were rough.

            I wanted to talk to her.

            What time is it, I asked her, Do you know? She smiled a small smile, an easy smile with a small mouth.

            It’s four forty, she said, after she checked her phone that was set on the counter. Then she went back to her bowl.

            I wanted to talk to her more.

            Her voice was musical, small but musical. She was small in every way and I realized that I wanted to protect her from everyone in the room and outside of it including myself.

            I was working through my thoughts, wondering what I could say to this woman, wondering if I could make myself talk to her, could I overcome my fears, could I break through the dim silence with light words, could she look at me with the small smile again, would I be able to do this right this time? I opened my mouth to allow something useful fall out of it but nothing fell.

            Then a man walked in, her small smile to dust and a large smile taking its place, he collected the girl with a kiss. Her heart swelled with her expression. Small in body, she was this man’s universe. I could feel it everywhere in the room.

            They left, bowls in hand, exchanging words, looks, glances, laughs, questions, communications. So that’s why she wanted it to go.

            I never got her name, I realized, but I never hit her either, so I was happy with the course of the relationship we had had and resolved to have more like it in the future.

           

Restaurant Observation 1

They were sitting there at the Pho restaurant, middle table not corner booth, awkward not comfortable, tense not relaxed, staring into their bowls of noodles. His was saturated with sriracha, he wasn’t really eating, he had forgotten how spicy that shit was, he had forgotten what it was like to eat dinner with his mom.

            He was nine, maybe ten, blonde and blue-eyed, her beautiful boy, her perfect Aryan boy (his dad was Jewish, never you mind the details). She watched him. The waiter would come and ask if she needed a refill on her water, and it would take her a moment to process his question, she was so carefully inspecting her son’s face, so carefully looking for the changes she must have missed. She felt as though she had not really looked at her son in years, and she probably hadn’t. She resolved to look harder.  

            “How is school, Jack?” she asked. He shrugged. “Do you like your new teacher?” He shrugged again. “Well what’s wrong with her?” He shrugged.

            This wasn’t really going anywhere fast.

            “She’s okay,” he finally said. He had a lisp, his two front teeth missing. He was smaller than the other boys his age. You could see that he was afraid. He was afraid. He was afraid of her, afraid of how far away she seemed on the other side of the very small table, and so he did not look at her, though he could not explain this, his vocabulary didn’t allow for it, he had trouble with reading comprehension and after all he was only a fourth grader.

            His mother paused, beginning to pick at her noodles the way he picked at his, swirling her chopsticks in small and decidedly counter-clockwise circles, slowly, slowly, wondering when she was ever going to get her appetite back.

            Her left hand felt too light. About two carats too light.

            “You haven’t come to this restaurant in a while, huh, Jack?” she asked. He shook his head. She paused her stirring, her face revealing nothing but a porcelain-perfect guise of unfeeling. “Does your dad still go to the burrito place much?” Jack shook his head.

            “He doesn’t go anywhere we used to go together,” he finally said.

            His mom nodded. “What about temple? Do you still go to temple?”

            Jack nodded a little.

            “He says we need Yahweh more right now than we did before.”

            Her heart felt too light, about a family of four too light.

            “How’s your sister?” she asked through a little choke.

            Shrugged.

            “I don’t know,” he said. “She says she doesn’t believe in Yahweh anymore.”

            They both started to quietly cry.

            The waiter didn’t offer her any more water.

And God Said "It Is Good"

There we were, two sentient beings, humans but alien to what we were about to do, human task though it was, godless in our eyes and yet Lords in our speech, there we were in his bed. There we were, mounds and hills, valleys and peeks of imperfection and honesty, heaving flesh between fitted sheet and coverlet, the stripped-down, raw, naked, all-natural versions of the characters we played every day. There were no masks because animals do not wear masks and we were wild.

            Biting at flesh, moving against each other in a rush, I needed him, I need him, I need him forever. There was no rhyme to the poetry that we tapped in Morse code with patient fingertips onto each other’s skins, so patient that we held each other in one place long enough to brand the views of our lines and prints, the works of art that were given us by a god on our outer shell hallelujah, onto the shell of the other. I can see my fingerprints all over him when I look at him now. There is my index finger, there are my teeth. When I look at him now I see more me than him.

            There we were in the midst of the experience, I did not think of anyone else and to my knowledge neither did he, I was so present that I forgot where I was does that make any sense at all? There we were battling for the prize, arguing with scratches and sweat over who was to receive the most pleasure this time, we were mammals but we were the kind of deities the Greeks revered but we were persons, personal persons, he was my person and he was in my person.

            There we were with our hearts, literal fleshy red-beating blood-beating chest-beating organs that refused to slow down for shit, figurative finicky things that brought us there in the first place, and we were so hungry that we ate the latter kind of heart of the other. We said each other’s names with a religious reverence. I called his name like he was god but I said it, too, like I owned it, I copyrighted it, it was only mine to say, he would only answer my prayers, and so I whispered them into his ear and slipped a tongue in after them before he made his way from breast to stomach, stomach to leg, leg to secrets, and I felt him whisper secrets to a sanctuary that was his to claim whilst I pondered crying at the shocking depth of my own desires god had answered my prayers hallelujah.

            We fit with a purpose, I loved him as a whole, though his whole and my whole may have merged in the air over us, the black hole vortex that sucked away my past and rubbed raw my future, however we were separate, however we were equal.

            I’ve never orgasmed with such intensity, physically or spiritually. I felt a virgin when I came to him which was what made me an alien to the planet that we landed on, I had always felt experienced before, even when I really wasn’t. Had I not been in other beds, had I not invited others into my own, had I not learned the tricks read the books bought the tee shirt, did I not fear and revere this act more than any other and in terrifying measures run toward and away from it at the same time with the same strength of limb, always in a circle with love at its center?

            There we were, MAKING LOVE, our sex not fucking, our sex transcendental. I shook and I knew that the real God was saying “It is good.”