Lidia Yuknavitch - The Small Backs of Children

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tozzedome,

I lift my lamp be( burp )zide the golden door.

There she was, a towering woman with people looking up at her, toasting her, a woman who had peed upright, a woman falling back into applause and laughter and adulation and dessert. Would it end there? Or would her momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult her toward some man who would come inside her, an American six-footer maybe, between her legs as if her legs were meant for that opening up, her pussy meant for that entering, and all night inside her would he maybe say, You are so great, oh baby, god baby, you are greatness itself, yeah baby, let me give it to you, and would he? Give it to her? As if that’s what she was made for, as if her body itself was brought to full height by the sexed-up flattery and hard prize of an American man?

Keep drinking.

The poet is emerging from a dream. Her head on her desk, her eyes catching glimpses of things in retinal flashes, the crouch of unwritten words in her fingers.

She sees the world on its side, blurry and colored like waking is. She sees what must be the hairs of her own arm foresting up in front of her. She takes a deep breath, holds it, squints; the ordinary objects of the room keep their secrets a few seconds longer. She wets her lips with her tongue, which pulls her fully from sleep and activates the nerve-twine and vertebrae of her neck. She muscles up her biceps and pop s he’s awake.

She is in Prague. Her poet self brought her here. Prague: the way history stays alive in some cities: Art. Architecture. Absinthe. Sunflowers. Roads made from stones. She gazes out the frame of her window, sees the steeple of an eight-hundred-year-old church, mouths the word psalm. Pages of her own work rest under her arms, on the table, in view, urgent. She fingers through them. The sound of the paper is something like petrified wings.

She is in Prague working with another, more famous poet. In some older world, time, place, this would mean apprenticeship, would fall into an order, well placed. She has left America to position herself in a line with Eastern Europe, amid others trying to revive the buzz of history. World wars and hidden jars of honey. Night skies filled with sirens or people trying not to let their breathing sound. Sex under cover of bridges. The voices of writers exiled and humming like electricity.

But she stops being nostalgic. She knows she lives in this world, not some other, no matter how old and beautiful European cities are. She’s an American poet in Prague.

She can afford to be. Capitalist pig.

She looks at the pieces of paper strewn around her: lines, scribbles, some words and pages barely decipherable. She picks up a half-eaten sandwich. Fuck it. She reaches over and pours an ounce of absinthe into a Pontarlier reservoir glass. The bulbous bottom swells with wet. Then she lays the flat, silver, perforated spoon across the rim and places a single cube of sugar on its face. She drips ice-cold purified water over the sugar until the color rises, until the gradual louche.

She lights a fire in the little room, sits in a hundred-year-old velvet chair. The heat brings on a dreamy glow of amber light. She drinks. Her hand moves to her other mouth, beginning the rhythmic throb. Because there is this: she’d rather live in the dreamy blur of everything she knows is dead than face the stark realism of an ordinary hand at the turn of this stupid-ass century. What a dull turning it’s turning into.

With her want she makes a decision: tonight she will abandon the prestigious workshops and seek out live porn. It is easy to make a clean exit when you are unburdened by relationships.

In the not-American night she is partly her poet self and partly her id. She passes a man near a bar who says something ludicrous to her. She doesn’t respond. Most of the time she’s either in her mind or in her body — thinking or acting. She doesn’t talk much. Never has.

She is aware of three things: the bruise-black effect of the night in the corridors of this city; her feet and their syncopated physicality; and the street itself.

A pounding between her legs.

She drains a flask from the inside pocket of a black leather jacket. She has been given the address to a place where a woman might mouth the mouths of other women.

What she wants first is to watch. To watch two women, not American, bring themselves to the brink of animal. The cum, the piss, the shit. Blood and sweat and mouths and salt. Skin reddened or scraped or bleeding or bitten or bruised. Shoved.

That violence.

Then she wants to dominate the scene.

If the scene fails, the writing will.

Of course she finds what she wants.

She purchases what she wants, gives herself exactly what she wants. She gives it and gives it until the having of it becomes the word mine , and beyond that even, until her thinking and her physical responses obliterate each other.

The poet watches from a velvet chair. A Moroccan, her skin black as oil, is fisting a Pole. The Pole is blindfolded, and her arms are bound to her sides with heavy white hang-yourself rope. She is on the marble floor of a large, high-ceilinged flat. Her legs are spread so wide she looks as if she might dislocate at the hips.

The Moroccan’s ass is high up in the air and her pussy and asshole are alive, opening and closing alongside her labor. She works hard on the Pole, her blue-black arm disappearing into the white.

Make her red and swollen , the poet says. She sits with her legs crossed, breathing calmly, her hands clasped beneath her chin. A delicate glass of absinthe on the table next to her.

The fisting of the Pole extends over time in waves.

When the poet is satisfied at the raw cleft of the Pole, she instructs the Moroccan to stop. The Pole’s breathing heaves; spit slides from her parted lips. Red blotches bloom on her white skin, randomly, the colors of the Polish flag. Her lips more than swollen.

The poet carefully opens a prepared towel, revealing a row of syringes with fingertip-size blue caps. She sits back down, tells the Pole to keep her legs spread. Don’t move. If you move or make a sound, it will be the death of you. Then, after a pause: Go on, then .

The Moroccan takes one needle and removes the blue cap. She crouches over the Pole with the intensity and concentration of a doctor. The Moroccan’s biceps flex as she moves in. She pierces the Pole’s inner thigh, close to her pussy, in a place where blue veins river-shudder beneath the infant-thin skin. Down first, pressing her finger at the skin firmly, then up, making a stitch. The Pole’s skin quivers but she does as she is told, does not move her body. She swallows a moan. The Moroccan caps the little needle and chooses another.

A small dot or two of blood emerges like the red head of a pin on a world map.

And again.

With each needle the Pole’s breathing deepens and heavies.

Sweat forms quickly on her upper lip, her cheeks, her stomach, her inner thighs.

The poet almost feels the Pole’s increasing light-headedness. The dizzy rise from pain to the rush of endorphins, the delirium at the top, the uncanny wish for more, even as a blackout seems imminent.

Twenty little needles up one thigh, twenty little needles down the other, blue caps creating railroads across the territory of a woman’s body.

The Pole’s toes shake like someone hanged.

The Pole clenches her teeth now and again.

Drools.

Still, she makes no sound.

Her hair flowing out from her head like a sunflower.

Her beating heart, to the dictatorial eye of the poet, is as stunning as a Warsaw uprising. How glorious the nearly silent criminal adventure.