Bed-Stained Sheets Remind Me of You

Bed-stained sheets -- menstruation that never occurs on time. Mattress pad shifting half off the side, I dream I am sleeping on a hill. Too small at night my right leg smacks your sleeping knee, my left the wall, loudly but you only mumble and drop your pillow. What is it like to will yourself too sleep? I've tried everything but voudoun blood sacrifices for the kind of thick dreamless rest you lie wrapped in, thick as felt. The noises of a house at night jar my breathing. I don't sleep. I don't sleep. I lie awake through jazz recordings and radio re-broadcasts and try to drown myself in peachish bubble-baths and old novels. What am I going to do without you here to remind me?

I Fantasize as He Walks Out

I fantasize about lying curled up on the slightly sticky tile floor of a men's restroom. Stall. I'm wearing dark leather pants, a dirty cotton t-shirt and I have brown eyes and dark messy soft brown hair. It’s at a rest stop somewhere Southern, the air is humid and smells of piss and pollen and cut grass. I'm waiting for a man to come in, tall and muscular in a wiry sort of way, much older than me. He pushes me into a stall, wordlessly unzips and I suck him off. His cock is thick and uncircumcised with an oval head. He comes in my mouth with his fist gripping my hair, I imagine it being the texture of cheap hand soap, thick and faintly oily/slimy, and I swallow it of course. He pushes me roughly to the side and pisses into the toilet, a few drops splashing back on my t-shirt. He zips up, walks out of the stall, kicking my legs as he walks out.

A Crooked Mile

Yesterday, on waking, I had this fantasy:
I was with a lover, male or female I do
not know except they were tall and slender with long dark
hair and long pale hands without visible scars or
markings. And it was a lover; someone I knew well.
They had a whip like the one I have, with long
leather lashes that feel soft rubbing against your
skin and stinging like a hand slap of saltwater
on striking it. They asked if they could whip me and I
assented and lay down on the bed on my
stomach; I was wearing a full, long
skirt of some soft fabric, silk perhaps, and a
similar blouse. I stretched my arms way out in front
of me so that I could grip the edge of the
mattress when they hit hard and suddenly I felt them
take my wrists and fasten them together, I don't remember
if it was with bondage bracelets or bare
chain, and then chained them to the bedpost.
And I said "You don't have to do that, I can hold
myself still."
They simply finished locking the chain in place
and said "Yes, and now you won't have to."
I squirmed but didn't say anything because I
thought I must trust them enough to let them do this or
I wouldn't be here, and I must trust someone to
this extent. Then they lifted my head, cupping my
chin in their palm and pushing my hair back
from my face which was comforting, and told
me "I am going to whip you until you are
crying, until you are begging me to hold you." And they
set my face back against the pillow. And I
understood that it was going to continue
for a long time because there was no way I could
bring myself to do that until it got to the point
where I absolutely meant it. And I was
half-dreaming so I could half-feel the tickling
fingers of the lash lifting my skirts higher over
my legs, the stinging warmth of the softer blows
and how the harder ones felt as though someone had
thrown very cold water over my lungs. And I could
feel myself squirming against the mattress and I
think in my dreaming I was squirming against my
blankets. But I couldn't imagine actually crying or
begging to be held, so the fantasy sort of
unraveled and I woke up and lay in my blankets
for a long time, thinking about it. Because these
are the sort of things I usually imagine doing to
others, and I enjoy the thought of doing this to
someone; how their bodies would jerk at the blows,
the sensual wetness of their arousal and tears and
of comforting them after. But this was something I
had imagined as someone doing to me. And I am discomforted by it.

Choke

Just before my father moved to Arizona
when I was twelve we walked the dog through the dusky seminary grass and around the playground and graveyard. He told me listen up: someday you'll be on a date with a boy in his car, maybe. The seat will be tilted back. His hands will be on your shoulders, creeping down beneathe the neckline of your blouse his tongue will push into your mouth and he'll reach in his back pocket; pull out a little square plastic packet and unwrap it. You take the rubber unfold it wrap it around his neck and pull hard. That was my father's answer to sex education-- I wasn't allowed to sit through it in school-- but he never told me what to do in a car with a girl when the seats are tilted back and the dark vynil upholstery is sticky slipping beneathe my short-skirted thighs and her bead-braids are scraping my face and anxious hands leave sweaty fingerprints over my arms, shoulders, neck and she breathes lipstick and discount perfume over my mouth and long red fingernails pick at the edges of my black nylon panties so I don't do anything at all.

Doppleboy

I wanted you from the moment you
told me (drunkenly, in a club) that you
still slept with a nightlight. Fell in
love with you the first timne I
spent a sleepless night in your
'screeching bed and discovered a police
baton kicked beneathe the nightstand.
All I had ever wanted was someone
I would not have to protect,
someone who would not try to
protect me.

Let me sugar the fine hairs
down the inside of your forearm,
lick the developing veins. I am
hungry for yoursalty flesh, to
taste your body for hours on
my lips. GIve me mine back

My Cold Dead Hands

Last night I asked Jay what things he did to make himself feel
real and he replied smoking cigarettes, a response I'd
been anticipating and for the same reasons he described--
gold star for me--that it was a continuous sensation:
inhale, feel smoke in mouth and lungs, exhale, etc.
I told him a little of how I used to cut
myself. I did not mention what happened after I moved
back in....but that was so strange and it wasn't even
really me doing it. I just woke in the middle of the
night to find myself tearing at the skin on my
arms. I wonder how long I'd been doing it before it
woke me up? Probably not very, ‘cause there wasn't
much blood. Anyways it only happened once and it stopped
after I took down all the stuff from the walls.
If I ever doubted rooms could be haunted I believe
it now.

Dare to Discipline

I am afraid of asking for things and beyond this
I am afraid of the things I would ask for. I leave
the window open day and night so things that
come in can get back out.....I haunt this room
and how does one banish the ghost of
oneself? I strip the old posters, pictures, fantasies
from the walls. I am no longer small and afraid.
I listen to the strange soft sounds that
get through the screen at night, and it is easier
to listen to than the tapping at the glass
when I leave the window shut. Jay asked if I
might be hallucinating it but I am not.
I believe I am not. Will I drip back into
psychosis in this awful house? I am tired of
nightmares.

The Smoky City

Once upon a time in a smoky
city a woman lay on her bed and
imagined someone else lying next to her.
It was an old fantasy, worn in soft
and familiar as her cotton sheets.
She began each night by lying at the
far edge of her empty double bed, and
slowly, tantalizingly slowly scootched closer and
closer towards the wall. Just as she
was about to roll against it a
pair of arms would wrap around her waist,
hands crossed possessively over her
chest and a hot tongue furrow up
the back of her neck. She imagined
this over and over, night after night,
year after year. Over time she had been
with enough men to have a realistic
expectation of what would come next,
these experiences gathered in other’s beds,
not hers. Hers was reserved as an altar, a
shrine, dedicated to the one she loved.
One night in August, as she
re-enacted this ritual, half-asleep, she
began to wonder why she bothered. It
was cold comfort, an imaginary body
with a face she never saw.
She sighed and rolled closer to dreams,
her propped open window admitting clove
smoke and British love songs from the student’s
apartment below hers. The music stole
into her half-asleep musings, into the
background of her fantasy. She drifted another
millimeter towards the wall and felt
something firm and hard against her back.
A pair of arms wrapped firm
and tightly muscled around her waist, a
pair of long white hands settled
possessively over her chest. A hot tongue
furrowed up the nape of her neck.
She did not awake fully until she felt
sharp teeth scraping just under her jaw bone.
Fear turned solid in her throat,
trapping her screams. She dripped with
her blood from human to fantasy, dying
in consummate ultimate union. Longing
made liquid fear and flesh. Worse
things can happen to those who dare to
wish in the smoky city.

Manifest Destiny

I was in a class in an auditorium being taught by Mrs. Schaetzle, my 7th and 8th
grade English teacher, and I was eating cereal from my
special bunny rabbit bowl and suddenly a huge rusty
sharp bolt stuck up through the bottom of it and yes I
am aware of Freudian implications and I nicked my
thumb on it and it was a little messy and all I
could think was--oh I haven't had a tetanus shot I
should probably get a tetanus shot. And I excused
myself from class and everyone stared and I went to
find a lady’s room but wandered out into the hall
leading into a Sears store looking up the narrow
clothing aisles for a restroom and bumped into an
older lady who clucked nicely over my hand and
escorted me to the restroom and helped me wash it and put
antibacterial stuff on it—truly I have always loved being
rescued—and she told me about how she used to live with her
partner (lover?) in a room in the mall when it was “just a
teeny tiny A-frame” and she shaped it with her hands
and disappeared but I was still frightened of my thumb and
held it up to the light and I thought I could see the
hole in it unsure so tried looking at the other one to
compare/contrast differences.

I was made out of a mirror reflection, that surface of cold
and slippery and someone had written all this stuff in
loopy neon green/yellow highlighter all over me, cursive sloppy
and I couldn't read it but could sort of see
bits of it reflected back up to me in the glare of
my own face and then somehow Lore thought it said I
should give him a blowjob and got mad that I wouldn't and I pulled away--woke up.

People with eyes flooded red with burst veins
and when they turned towards me red blood dribbled
out of the corners of their eyes. Not through the tear
ducts but from the lower eyelid underneath, like seeping out.

Irene Goodnight

It is one of those very dark nights when the wind seems dry and restless as it shifts and moans around the buildings and scanty trees outside. I press my face to the window as if half-expecting to see one of the wandering girl-ghosts you used to swear haunted this street, and the glass is cold, smoothly hard against my cheek; my breath fogs milky against it.

It is a night that makes me remember all those conversations we shared in this bed together, listening top each other's low sighs as our bodies cooled against the sheet. I remember one night in particular, one of the last before we separated. We lay entwined, the air strangely still and silent after all my panting and sobs and the high-pitched cry that shook from your mouth as you came. On the old stereo in a corner Billy Holliday sang softly, as though from a far off radio station, and the room smelled of lit candles, old flowers and very faintly, sweetly of sweat. You pressed your lips against the back of my neck and asked me "What would you come back for?"

I knew instantly what you meant, you have always been given to such morbid turns of mind, and with 'Gloomy Sunday' playing in the background what other sort of question could one ask? I knew also how I was supposed to respond. There are certain questions a girl can ask that may only be answered in a single way. Still I was silent, trying to pretend I hadn't heard, as your fingers crept up my spine to the nape of my neck and pulled gently on a soft tendril of hair as though trying to pull from [it] an answer. I was stubborn, afraid of being coerced by the salty-fruit smell of your body or the languorous swaying of your smooth tight thighs.

Now that we are miles and days apart, the answer of course is you. If I died I would surely, choicelessly, come back for you. For the way your lips part as you hum my name, your body twisting amorously beneath me. For your tongue shaping my narrow shoulders as your fingers pinch at my collarbone. For the exquisite sharpness of your lacquered nails gliding down my spine, between the firm round halves of my shyly virginal ass, teasing gently, tapping, at the tight pink puckering, pushing against me just long enough to make me uncomfortable with my own arousal before moving forward again grind smoothly over my clit. I would come back for the agonizing night you bound my trembling body to the bed and teased my breasts and stomach with your tongue and I screamed out for you to penetrate me. In an instant the heel of your palm was hard against my splayed red opening and two of your jellied fingers curled inside me. I shuddered and strained against the ropes and you licked your lips and laughingly told me I felt like a sweet ripe orange, like the sections of a juicy sunsoaked orange. Your teeth scarped my nipples as another and then another of your probing, drumming fingers slithed into me and I lost count of everything. Your whole hand pumped wetly in and out of me while playfully slapping my thighs with the other until the world lurched forward and back and I seemed to be breathing upside down, my body shaking and clenching around your hand. And I would surely come back for how gentle you were with me after that, as I lay there red-faced and a little embarrassed. How you held me and let me rest my face against your breasts as you slowly untied me, stroked my hair and soothed me back to myself.

I would come back for you darling, just for you, and that is a secret you may fold beneath your pillow at night for whatever cold comfort it brings you.

Ghost Are Never Naked

I fantasize about people without gender, or people who have somehow overcome gender. And I'm not going to separate this out because all my fantasies have been lifestyle fantasies. The people in them are always older and significantly more knowledgeable and experienced than me.

The first things I can remember as fantasies were derived from nursery rhymes, my favorite, which I'm sure is incredibly clichéd was "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe...." I found it incredibly pornographic. I would lie in bed at night and think about being led around and spanked....I've never even written this before....

The first sexual fantasy I can remember having was that it was my wedding night and I was lying in bed-- the groom was somewhere, I rarely thought about him-- and his beautiful sister would come in to tell me goodnight or something. She would notice how nervous I looked and ask me what was wrong, and I would explain to her how afraid I was because I didn't know what to do or how this was supposed to work....in these fantasies I was always a virgin. I would be all upset and almost crying and she would sit next to me on the bed and give me a hug to comfort me and start talking to me and kissing me, we'd end up having sex though I was so little I wasn't at all sure how that worked [sometimes I'm still not so sure]. Often these would end with me being tied to the bed somehow.

When I was nine I had an imaginary sexual friend, a tall Victorian French woman (a lot of this probably was influenced by my ghosts) that went to boring places with me, adding to everything an incredible vibrancy by the strange dynamics between us. I had never read any porn or heard of protocol or anything like it but now thinking about it I realize my imagined behavior with her closely echoed that kind of thing. She would bathe me and spank me and touch me, dress me up like a girl from a picture book, subtly showing me off to her imaginary Victorian friends ( I had a really wild imagination) but interestingly enough I don't think I ever actually thought about having sex with her. I stopped imagining her when I was about 12.