Mishle 16 - 2nd Draft

"It is from God that words come", she said, and he called them gifts of the tongue. His hands were turning the knobs of her breasts, his lips licking the little bumps below her nipples, which had always been too orange for her taste - so she made him kiss her in the dark.

And sometimes she thought that she got it, because what were humans if not little creatures tossing around in the night, feeling around for the God's presence like she felt for his flesh, trying to distinguish meaning from nonsense like her fingers diffrenciating between skin and sheets.

He annointed her over his bed, with the sweat of his forehead. She licked the insides of his thighs, and kissed the covenant that lay between them, sealed in a white mark upon her hair.

"But emotions come from man", she said, and she thought, "And sometimes from woman".

But by then, he was too busy to hear her,  his thighs wrapped around her thighs, his chest hairs brushing up against her breasts, and amid the breaths of prayers, she could feel her hair unwinding, their covenant falling apart, with no words to capture the slight shatterings - only a kiss that tasted of wine and cinammon.

Mishle 16

"It is from God that words come", she said, and he called them gifts of the tongue. His hands were turning the knobs of her breasts, his lips licking the little bumps below her nipples, which had always been too orange for her taste - so she made him kiss her in the dark.

And sometimes she thought that she got it, because what were humans if not little creatures tossing around in the night, feeling around for the God's presence like she felt for his flesh, trying to distinguish meaning from nonsense like her fingers diffrenciating between skin and sheets.

He annointed her over his bed, with the sweat of his forehead. She licked the insides of his thighs, and kissed the covenant that lay between them, sealed in a white mark upon her hair.

"But emotions come from man", she said, and she thought, "And sometimes from woman".

But by then, he was too busy to hear her,  his thighs wrapped around her thighs, his chest hairs brushing up against her breasts, and amid the breaths of prayers, she could feel her hair unwinding, their covenant falling apart, with no words to capture the slight shatterings, no broom to sweep up the shards of glass - only a kiss that tasted of wine and cinammon, a slight itch on her left nipple, and a bit of white that would come out in the shower.

Fucking

""Don't push it", she said, as if I could do anything but, with you running around in my head. Kisses became evidence that you meant to leave me, and I would have preferred slaps, to the uncertainty of nights between your thighs, if I weren't so addicted to your fucking body."

She paused."That is the worst fucking writing I've ever seen - and I've read Daniel Steele".
"Daniel who?"
"Steele. She writes harlequin romance novels."
"Ok."
"You know the type that I'd like to read, if I weren't so busy trying to harlequinize my reality."
"Is that a word?"
"Shakespeare created neologisms - why can't I?"

Their conversation dangled (yes, like the Simon and Garfunkel song), as they sat on the couch, his laptop lying between them - and as she read her novel, he reread his words, and found them lacking; her kisses no longer seemed real, and he began to doubt that she loved him.

What kind of a girlfriend doesn't like your writing, anyway? Not one he needed - but he was so addicted to fucking her body.

Free Writing

They say that Israel waxes and wanes like the moon;
the bright orb leans against the blue sky;
I am enveloped by your black clouds,
mists winding and unwinding from my thighs,
two thick sticks that once held light inside me,
but now it is only when I feel you release,
that the emptiness decreases slightly,
a silver sliver worming its way through the hollow,
in a way that a burrower might forge an unkosher sukkah, or a hobbit hole:

If Israel is a menstruant woman, will God not nibble the crevice of her neck,
or bite her thighs?
Will His lips not touch her breasts?

But the purity must be preserved:
Let us hang a white sheet between us,
lest I stain you scarlet, as I stained your couch,
that time I was a week early -
and let us not touch each other,
lest my moon stop shining.

I could not love you because my lips could not speak,
there could be no becoming, the small act of creation
formed with each letter, like a kiss -
and what world have we created between us,
this little couch, and those tiny burgers,
 and silences to light our journey,
which once was lit by the moon of our stomachs,
waxing and waning into each other,
hushed "I loves you"s breathed into the dark,
the breath of being, and I nurtured your seed inside me,
and then resorted to cliches,
when the love could bear me no longer.

Planes' Plie

"I have become weaker than the wind", you said, "spinning in each direction like a ballerina with a broken leg", and in between the loathing for your mixed metaphors, I thought of a plane, of the wind pushing and pulling to bear you away from me, like the slow withdrawing of our thighs beneath mud-colored sheets.

I was menstruating, and resentful of a world that told me the blood between my thighs didn't mean anything, and somehow this was liberation. Men never had to be liberated - even though, according to Rousseau, they were everywhere in chains: "It's different when you're enslaved to yourself, because, in addition to being the slave, you're also the master",  I said, on our first date, but you just laughed and poured me more wine. I got so drunk, I nearly vomited while giving you a blowjob, but you were still able to come in my mouth, and when I left in the morning, I knew that you'd call me.

It was on the fourth date that I brought you flowers - I thought I was so cool for shifting the gender paradigm. You spent an hour looking for a vase; by the time you found one, the petals had wilted slightly, and I had peed four times.

 

 I like peeing; I like the feeling of letting go. So why is it so hard to release you, crystal by crystal, before your yellow rots in my mouth like a bunch of dandelions? I used to pick them during summer afternoons, and weave them into my hair, a walking stereotype waiting for the dramatic music, accompanied by deep-voiced male narration: The young lady tries not to cry as she reads Susan Sontag's ode to urination, and imagines airplanes dancing in the wind like disfigured ballerinas.

Shmuel 1/Rilke (trans S. Mitchell)/Cher

 He came to me through the shadows;
 at night we played chess beneath white sheets,
 flashlight between skinned knees -
 like the child that grows,

our love learned to swallow tears,
our lips learned to lie,
our mouths whispered good-bye:

Now, who will play with my fears?

Tragicomic Cups of Coffee

Maggie had lost the ability to focus. She clicked on headlines in the NY Times and NY Magazine, glancing at the top paragraph of each article before closing the tab on her browser. In between these attempts to read the news, she would go out for coffee with friends and blame all her problems on Facebook.

    The cafe nearest to her was one of those artsy places: Jazz played constantly in the background, and it sold salads with names like "Jerusalem Syndrome" and "Billy Holiday Delight". When Maggie was younger, she once dreamed that she was the Messiah, but then her teacher told her he had to be a king, and she was too young to dream about sex-change operations - speaking of which, there was some show about trannies that was the latest hit on Israeli TV, but being too lazy to read the article, Maggie didn't know exactly why the damn thing was so popular. The headline was enough, along with the picture of a drag-queen, wearing a silver necklace she would - what a silly phrase, "die for". Who on earth would die for a necklace, unless they were already suicidal? Well, give up a coffee for, perhaps.

    Maggie had a date that night, with some British dude she had met at a party. He had red hair, and she liked the way he smiled -but most of all, she liked his ability to completely skewer someone with his words, while laughing. There must be a more eloquent way to express that, but it's hard to be eloquent when you spend most of your time stalking photographs of other people's babies.

    When he showed up at her door with flowers, she was surprised - no one had ever bought her flowers before. She usually dated progressive types, who made you split the bill on the first date. She was beginning to suspect their feminism was merely stinginess in disguise. After she put the flowers in water, and spent fifteen minutes searching for a vase, they went to the local ice-cream shop. He ordered mint. She ordered chocolate.

    Afterwards, she didn't remember much of their conversation. She didn't even remember her asking him to come inside, but soon they were a mess of chest and lips and thighs, and her dress lay on the floorm her bra strewn over a chair. His boxers had landed on her laptop.

    Afterwards, they fell asleep in each other's arms, and when she woke up, she found a thank-you-note on her pillow. He'd forgotten his glasses on her desk. The entire day, she waited for his phone-call. She kept the note and the glasses in her top drawer.

    But no phone-call had come by the time she went to sleep (2 am) after several stressful cups of coffee. The jazz trumpets seemed to echo the beating of her heart, syncopated and out of sorts, and she wished that her own body could sound as beautiful as the music of an era where people didn't waste their time looking up online pictures of cats.

    The next morning, she took out the note and re-read it. She held the glasses to her breasts, and imagined his lips on her nipples. Again, he did not call. On the third day, she decided she might as well be productive and write some emo poetry, but the words would not come.

    It took a month for her to throw out the glasses. The note remained buried in the miscellaneous file that she kept in her closet. Soon, she found herself another first date - this time at the local cafe. Her partner was very impressed that she knew all the waiters, and she felt herself smiling halfway through her first sip of caffeine - but she did not invite him in at the end of the evening, and he went home feeling anxious.

    He spent the night weighing the pleasure of her laughter against the constriction in his chest when he felt pain - he had recently been spurned by another, and why risk a second chance at heart-break?

    When the phone-call she expected did not come, she was surprised to find she had learned not to cry. The next time she went out, she practiced a frown to take between sips, lest the man in question think that she likes him, lest he break her heart - and the good man, taking note of her frown, decided she wasn't interested, and went home to bury his bitterness in a cup of coffee.