Thursday, April 16, 2009

Secrets - Jessalyn

She took all of us and we in turn took each other, if only to find a morsel of her scent on each others' skin. And then, as was inevitable, we were left again only with each other and a fresh bitterness which we took turns playing nursemaid to.

What was it about her. That kept so many of us baying at her doorstep. Salivating for the slightest flick of her Atlantic colored eyes in our direction. She was a brutal teacher in the allure of silence. Anyone can be desirable if you can be quiet enough. If through silence you can suggest that the carrot seeds you hold in your palm are really emeralds.

The first time I split her I gasped and said, "You're pierced."
"No one ever notices," she murmured.
I did not understand how that was possible. She told me the story. As if the story was explanation:

The summer he left her. Wanted to become something exotic for him. Something strange and desirable in her strangeness. Went back to Florida. Went back to the humidity and the banyans and her mother and the man who did it had it photographed. His living room. Spread and knifed. Could not bring myself to ask her if from her body had flowed the most obscure and obscene tincture: clitoral blood. O what gold could you create, with that. What sicknesses you could you heal. The cunt already alchemic in its metallic lunar conjurings. Look here. Add this pale fluid. Transform. Did not ask but instead pulled her underwear up over her hips. Slept beside her in her slick gold sheets. In the morning left her dreaming in the waxing desert light. Returned home, as ever, to the man I lived with.

Only later understood just how much she had revealed. And much later, much much later, after she had gone, after she had left all of us, I found a line of mine in a poem of hers. Mine, yes, though refined to what it should have been, the pit expertly extracted with no soft flesh clinging to its whorls and folds: Secrets are telling.

No comments:

Post a Comment