The Egg Someday a Woman

On hour four of our five hour drive home, there is nothing more that we want to listen to beyond breathing, the hum of the road. I recline my seat completely, loose the zipper of my party dress and curl there under my winter coat.

You start at my neck where spine gives way to scalp, fingers and nails unraveling my hastily dressed hair and my nerves. My shoulders are clay; your prints someday will be prehistoric, a history I will read in photographs when I am too wrinkled to see. I think this must be why you take pictures of me when I am undressed, so that we will both remember.

The knobs of my back are neither piano keys, guitar strings, nor the glossy depressions of brass instruments. I am more like a dinosaur who has lost her plates, who lathers daily in foaming soaps and sweet lotions to keep from showing my reptilian nature. I am dry and I hold my tongue behind my teeth not because it is forked, but because it is more like a club than an organ for chatter, pleasure, or song.

You touch me anyway where my dress falls open down my back, a silk skin I am shedding; you abandon the limits of this aperture for a hand up my skirt. I open my eyes and through the window I look beyond my own smoky reflection to the night sky, and when you put your fingers in me I see in every constellation a vessel I must fill.

Ground Control

David Bowie croons while we brush and floss our teeth, and I begin bouncing when Space Oddity reaches a climax. The mirror is flecked and my reflection giddy, while M makes all of the usual, exaggerated faces. I love him best when he unveils himself in foolishness, in monstrous contortions of his features, like a child, trying to see if hideous will stick.

I woke up sick today. Every stomach upset worries me now that I shall become unexpectedly pregnant, though I'm more in danger from vitamins taken without something to settle them, meals at odd hours or missed all together, twice the usual calories in drink. It is difficult to imagine our lives making room for a child; we're more like novelized versions of ourselves when I do imagine it, the abstract future, a readiness I can't imagine anyone ever really having, only assuming or pretending that they do.

Though this may be what I tell myself.

He's turned out the lights and so must I now turn off, too.

Near Enough to Burn

There are many things I've started to write in my mind, lately, that never quite made it to any page, paper or otherwise. Feeling more like myself means gathering library books, cooking new things, browsing obsessively for cognac leather boots. I do not want to write about the wedding or the honeymoon, or at least do not want to using those words. It came and blazed and went, and we were elated for it.

I'd like to write about being unable to keep from peeking at the sizes in my mother's blouse, bra and jeans that she left at the reception - not from any illicit activity, but because she helped to decorate and changed into her dress there after wards, accidentally leaving her things for me to gather and ship. She is smaller than I am, in numbers anyway, and I smaller than she in character. She never looked in my diary, after all.

I'd like to write about the false gas fireplace in the second hotel M and I shared, how he turned the television a full ninety degrees so he could sit in front of it, near enough to burn if the flames had been real instead of as far from it as the cotton tatters blown from a plastic Halloween lantern. How this picture of him, his pale body and hairy legs, is the picture of my husband and my greatest delight. His lap did not seem complete without my head in it, his arms empty as anchors dangling without a ship. So I sat with him.

Cheap hotel rooms can really sometimes feel like palaces.