DAY 12

When he looks at me, my flesh, my bones, evaporate. I am a prisoner in his eyes, and without them — the light that gleams, that scatters — I am nothing; for him I am nothing. But when he closes them, when he drifts in the darkness beneath his lids, I sense my freedom. Words return me, the elusive past, other lands, moments!      I breathe with the shuttered pain of a girl becoming a woman. I stretch out my hands to the singular body I yearn to touch. I dive through the clouds that have blossomed from my feet. I open my mouth and drink the torrent  of my excessive thirst.      These are my breasts, shoulders, arms, and this, the hollow at the base of my throat, where tiny shadows torment and gambol. Below, where my waist slopes to the black tangle of my sex, and my thighs are born, machines of velocity, I become pure temptation.      I surge and recede. I ride the boast of a simple step. And when I pivot suddenly, sniffing my prey, the thrill of capture, asphyxiation, rending distills for me alone.      It is time, my time, the only time I will

ever have. For it comes again and it dies and returns and vanishes.      And in each I take something of the last, a brief sensual stain, eruptive blood, thrashing dust: monuments to the triumph that sustains me.      For when he looks at me again, tilting me this way and that, the venom quickly spreads. Whatever I had gained, I give up. Even the compassion of being a woman for a man, and of accepting nothing less, pivots to the storms that brew in his eyes.      But that, like much else, is what I have known.      I offer no excuse; I want no compensation.            And you, who wants more, forget me.

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