I lay in bed and imagine pressing against somebody else. Their hands move from an empty spot on my chest up towards my throat, resting in a broken collar flush against my veins. Slowly one hand crawls warm up my face and begins forcing its way into my mouth, first with coiling digits, discrete tapered shapes kissing around chapped lips, then all long fingers in tight formation urgently gripping cliffhang legionary teeth. The hand tugs my jaw open and I press the blunt ends of my wrists together in a shaking ribbon overhead. I stop breathing. I weigh 107 pounds. Tomorrow I'll eat tomato soup and think about it very hard.
I think of it every day. It’s a nervous compulsion, I think. Bile reaction animal response. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, right. Ordinary. Ferocity in practical life.
I like to be held down. I’m a whore. I’ll do anything you want. I hold my wrists out in front of my torso to present them to you. I want you to know what you’ll be working with before we start. The bedsheet surface of my skin is pulled off the bone by half-colored veins and jagged patches of downy hair. You unwrap your hands red over mine and smear your thumb into my palm to seal it over. I love you. I look away and imagine your fingerprints branded into my skin, blushing uneasy as you inspect me, careful of acne scar and mercy mark. Take a long breath. Then you sigh, turn around to your shelf and dig for something while I hum knockkneed and easy. I shuffle in my belt and try not to speak.
Daisy has a disease. Her body is a tiny jaundiced quiltwork thing, ball jointed, dotted with gray-blue patches under her breasts and on the insides of her legs. She lays in bed all day, crossing off some lolita birth defect, waiting for monday morning pill friezes and thursday afternoon ermine fluff. She gets nervous. Shaking. Daisy says she thinks there’s an anvil sitting heavy over her in the attic, and she worries that it might slip through the ceiling fan and split her in two broadside along the sheet. Every once in a while she throws up and asks you to sit with her, to sing and touch her for easier comforting. When your hand pushes on her thigh, her kneecaps drift loose under her scrapes and bedsores and drag slow to the backs of her legs, pop lost alone in soft grey mess. Better left alone no matter what she might tell you.
A few hours later, you’ve gathered a couple spools of black thread in the palm of your right hand, rolling them through the plush curvature of your joints while your left thumb presses over the loose ends. You unfold the chair behind me and push me to sit, four arms now fully extended out under my throat. You gather my elbows together and watch as the tension in my shoulders stretches through my cheeks, pulling tight and pushing hard against my sternum. You hold a hanging tongue of thread across some tendon and starting wrapping me tightly together, ecstatic as you fashion a gordion outline between my pinkies. We’re both transfixed by the bulging patterns of flesh between the crisscross scribble, sixteen bruising violet plots you’ve drawn out for harvest. I look up to your cheeks and hang my face out to touch you too far away.
I brush my fingertips against the gray screen door. She looks like Mary, Queen of Scots.
(2017)