Next time won’t you sing with me?

By Lily Robert-Foley

A. A corset the shape of a body. And she enveloped his member in her folds, in her pink ecstasy, and moved her hips in the infinity sign, and hunted for her own pleasure in the marsh weeds. And then in a wild tangle, he fucked her in her white dress, coming in her like a wife, and she felt the spirit of sex coming back to her and pleasure lifting her from sadness, like a light object borne on the wind. As though as his cock massaged her inside, some painful contraction was being undone in pieces, and the pain flowing out as joy, the wetness, a piñata, a high note ballad, exactly that for which the body aches in deprivation. Afterwards, in the bathroom, a little bit of blood. Afterwards she smoked a cigarette and watched the lights, feeling liquids pour from her like rain funneled off the gutter.

B.

C. “Can I?” “Ce n’est pas que je ne veux pas, parce que ce n’est pas du tout le cas….”

D. Drunk and so driving too fast.

E. Enthusiasm. Even the color.

F. First she made him watch, as she manipulated her fingers, but he couldn’t stand it at some point and tore her fingers away from her, sliding into her roughly. First the stairs, his hands down her pants, her running, him running after her, up flights, the stairs, taking flight. First they beat each other with sticks, and then, in the dark, he took the bulk of her hair in his hands and hung her: wrung and hungered her.

G. Get out of here, who wants you anyway.

H. He agreed. He begged her, and finally through the unbeatable fatigue that comes through over-drink, she succumbed, and he ripped her open, tore through a new virginity she had built over so many years of freezing. He came at her first after she came out of the bathroom at the hostel. He came at her from the side and underside, and there was a sincere bolt of ecstasy like she hadn’t felt in too long. He came behind her and held her as though, even though he could not give himself to her, he could somehow still heal her. He came into her from under, she felt airlifted, maneuvered onto his member as though a seatbelt, locking in. He couldn’t, really. He drew a finger down her body’s mesa. He gave her what she had been wanting most to feel: pain. He had one ear like a pixie, came to a point. He held her a bit until the light came in and then she vanished. He held her chin near her ear with his hungry hand, desire in the style of need. He hurt her, smacked her, beat her, tore her clothes, ate her feelings. He kissed her neck, threw her against a wall. He laughed and repeated her. He organized her body. He reached his hands into her and manipulated her organs. He said, “Either one of us of both of us has wanted this for a long time.” He said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He softened, his dick laying down, a sick sleeping puppy. He told her to go sleep in his sister’s room so they wouldn’t be found out. He turned her over and got her on her palms and knees and came in her from the back. He was ugly but he touched her right, his hands across the ripped holes in her jeans, his tongue all over her, the cab driver pulling over, screaming at them to get out, the desperate shortness of breath, the lugubrious pre-dawn.
           Heaven.
           Her body had never felt so unified. Her eyes were clamped closed as though in a horror film. Her fingers knew everything. Her hands came to her eyes the way they do to one’s mouth as vomit comes up.
           His cock became more important than her body, and she became, came, his cock, more, more. His cock was wide, a little rectangular, substantial, and when he moved into her, Olaf watched from a chair in the corner, hurting, she screamed low, deep, as though the penis had pierced the belly of her sound. His dark hair and Mediterranean face in her mind. His girlfriend’s birthday. His girlfriend’s birthday. His lump moved into her for a moment, and then fell out like a poop.

I. “I love your ass” he said, she called him sexy. “I want you,” her words like a pressed grape, his body smooth, covered with down fur, like a baby mole. If the vagina is indeed a wound, it’s reversible. Is it even real? It burns now only, oxygenated by the present. It hurt and little air pockets kept coming out and embarrassing her. It was 2am when they met and 4am when they never saw each other again. It was dark grey, there were parents down the hall and a vague odor of adolescence clung even to the bed posts, the bang sweep, the miniature figurines, the rhizome of belongings. It was flat with gravity and smooth as breath. It was night, she was put to bed by the shadow of the trees as the forest limbs raped her, and she lost, I mean, got lost. It was summer and the hair on the back of his head splayed into otter-textured stalactites. It wasn’t hard.

J.

K.

L. Later on the train, he felt for her hands, “you have such tiny hands.” Like the past, just a shade of reality. “Look how much has happened,” she said. Looked at her with a mixture of hate and desire and the center of the earth swallowed her.

M. Most wounds are created from a puncture—it’s through the puncture that the skin opens.

N. New lovers. “Non,” and he reached in for her, took her body like a puppet, onto the bed, manhandled her terrifically, grabbed her breasts, position her body for her, overwhelmed her femininity, clamped her legs, pulled and stuck it in her.

O. Olaf was there, he had suggested it, the three of them tromping up the stairs and unsheathing their clothes as youths do, still a little unpracticed.

P. Pure lack, pure cream, pure air, pure breeze, pure Irish.

Q.

R. Rejection has a freshness. “Remember just a moment ago when we weren’t saying anything?”

S. She ate eggs outside, and tried to eat her heart. She became very busy ripping threads and slowly, the white dress was turning to tatters. She couldn’t convince him at first. She cried. She doesn’t want to write anything now, the memory of his water-like embrace. She felt mishandled, empty, her heart turning to ice. She felt them through her hands and became most intimate with the back of his neck, where the hair ended. She followed him back to France and he leaned her over an end table from where she looked out at the clay roofs of Toulouse and he put it in her and fucked her until he came, his hands under her, around her breast, pumping desperately. She had just fucked, on the street, and she was dry, from the cock, the daylight, the drink, the end of night. She had lost her bearings already, had already felt liked she’d slept with people for reasons she didn’t understand, and so uncertain, her confidence shaky, too young to have forgiven herself and too old to be a virgin. She had problems at that time and finally she released herself to tears and moved away from him. She hurt. She leapt through the light blue of the morning shadows on sidewalk. She must not go on now for reasons she won’t explain. She reached for the phone later as the men read comic books or ate candy and she called Olaf, somehow wondering what her virginity had been constituted of. She remembers complaining about men feeling like sticking it in you was some kind of insult, when truly, that’s what men want, and can’t get it, and it’s what women want and can’t get it, so he did. She remembers: you call the ones that hang down from the top “stalactites” because they “hang tite,” and the ones that grow up from the ground, “stalagmites” because they “mite grow to become stalactites.” She shed it like snake skin, and hurled it, speeding, it crashed against a banner and made a sound like a drum. She sorted through the fabric with a sort of wild serenity. She stood naked, in the flesh, feeling her hides strip off of her metaphorically. She stuttered, “Stay with you?” She turned him over and straddled him, wanting to defeat him, and she did. She unfastened the knots, and pulled the strings loose from her corset. She wanted to cry and fell asleep. She was fumbling over her own pleasure, as he moved back and forth, caressing her hunger, feeding her, wrecking her. She was wrong, I mean, wronged. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do it, but he called her an angel, and pressed his fingers into spots all over her body, as though he were a blind man who knew nothing, and through his knowing nothing knew everything. She wore the sexiest jeans ever, and danced the best, she had lost her self—not herself, but her self, and was momentarily free, some kind of gift.
           Still, Olaf hid somewhere in a silver box in her room, his face just an image.

T. That had been two years prior. The body’s location on the bed moving to its own fancy. The boy with the gaunt posture and the sexy bangs. The hinges on the door making a sound like rust moving fast, like time speeding up, the locks undoing, and yet—. The near future’s uncertainty disrupts you, your sense, your direction. The top of a mountain, an octagon of glass, a story written later about the gaze, wanting, wanting to be wanted, wanting to be wanting. The youthful honesty of desire, of sincere athleticism. Then she stood. There was general movement, the name of her lover on her lips. There was a song on about giving love another chance, and he lifted her and swung her round and round. There were two of them, how did they talk her into it? They arrived in one piece, she said, “I could totally fuck you right now” and so soon upstairs, clothes off, two loaves, unbaked, her body felt like a wad, fat, blond, full of lumps. They attended a party in an old Hausmannian and they hunted for a corner in which to fuck. They found an empty space between roofs and two nights later she stood in his window frame in a white dress, watching the cemetery come to life in the dawn. They had been sitting upright, legs mutually akimbo, she felt her feet pressing into the sweat on his back. They spun and the world turned indiscriminate as though taken over by love or paint. They sweated and heaved, her heart having been restored somewhere. They walked backwards in tiny steps and he reached down and unhooked her scanty red shoes and removed them delicately as though she were a child. They went to the Philosopher’s Club. This one’s dick never went inside her completely, but a bigger dick, the size of a passion, fucked her. “Tu as une jolie petite copine en Angleterre?” she leaned against one of those French iron window railings, and bathed her eyes in her lids.

U. Underneath. Upon opening her eyes, her vision shifted, a blond, blue eyed friend with a different name faced her and rocked over her in violent necessity, grunting, coming.

V.

W. When dancing is right there is no body only music. When Olaf went downstairs for water, the other’s face came into that private space in-between the mouth and ear of a lover, “I’ve wanted to fuck you since I met you.” “Why don’t you invite me to your house?” she asked, so he did, and by 8:30 he was under her, his little man with his little hat, his tongue against her pink sex, she could barely feel him and it was all over by 9:15 or so.

X.

Y.

Z.




Lily Robert-Foley was born in San Francisco in the later part of the last century to an acupuncturist and a musician/painter. Mostly, she writes, travels, and makes radical linguistic translation devices known as machines. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in various online and print journals including bathhouse, critiphoria, angelhouse and Mad Hatter Review. Selections from her graphemachines project will be published in the coming year as part of the Xerolage series, a division of Xexoxial Editions. Before joining Omnia Vanitas Review, she was assistant editor of the Green Lantern Press in Chicago where she transcribed and annotated The North Georgia Gazette (Green Lantern Press, 2009). Currently, she resides in Paris where she organizes a reading series, teaches English at the Université DesCartes, and is pursuing a doctorate in General and Comparative Literature at the University of Paris VIII.

The North Georgia Gazette (excerpt)


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