DESIRE

When I hold my hand up to the glass and press it, I can feel heat penetrate my skin as though your skin was on the other side shoving my pores open. If a hand is held up for hours and follows the motion of the sun, the light burns a red halo around its rim that stays there for days. How do I know these things? I wear your marks on my skin. I used to dream about a city of glass and now this city is glass to me. I see a body stretched out against the sidewalk the skin pierced with shards. I can feel the body throbbing like my own heart. Shards stick out of it like quills - like a splintered rainbow. I think I'd like to touch it. I'd like to run my hand across the surface and feel the glass nick my palms. I would like to feel the heat come out of it and up through the tips of the glass and burn my skin. I would take a drop of blood at the tip of my finger like a drop of honey. I wear your marks. Don't leave me here, marked by you but unclaimed. The booth that I'm waiting in is marked with stale piss like forgotten territory. What I believed when I woke from my fever was that I would touch the plastic and hear ringing at last. I know there's a mark that's missing still. There's a sound that hasn't cut through the air's grimy skin. One sound. A small thing. The heat bakes my wishes as they fly up and brings them down to fall into the bleeding vacuum of my opened throat.

He could make himself invisible. He walked sometimes in places no one else would see or go to - small pockets in the city, tight places where he wouldn't be seen. He carried a set of silk cords around his neck and he often pulled them tight letting the pressure remind him of when he had lived with mirrors. He remembered looking at a shape in the glass, a shape that was molded like wax so gracefully that he could easily fall in love and skin like a warm candle. Now he could walk for hours looking for something to eat but he thought that things were better. He was invisible now. He found an alley, a quiet place surrounded by red brick and dark air. He wished that it was warm enough to feel his skin in the air and not buried under the stiff dirty clothes that he wore. He remembered how it felt not to wear dirt on his skin everyday, but he felt lucky to find a quiet spot with a thick tree branch growing over the top. He became invisible the cord twisting around his neck, squeezing the flesh so that his skin ripened like a plum and he dangled in the air his feet hanging like heavy flowers, his toes just touching the ground. He imagined a kiss. His cock stood hard and spurting released from his pants. He was breathless... suspended between one world and another and tears ran down his face. It was hard to find a place and it was hard to feel the cold air blow through the threads of his filthy clothes his skin turning clear and flaking off as he turned the winter wind revolving him to the left and back to the right and then to the center and darkness sealing him shut and safe.

I have a way to remember you. Everyday, I scout ruined buildings collecting pieces of glass that I find scattered on the concrete. I take them to the hub of the park and I spread them on the ground. I use the edge of the sharpest piece to slice the skin that holds my calf muscle to its bone. I want to open myself to you. I will open myself to you. I want to make myself transparent like glass for you. I press the glass beneath the cut and watch blood sliding thick across it. Then I take a clear piece of glass and press it against the bloody one. I can hold dripping red glass up to the sun and feel the heat vibrating through me. Silence moves like a bubble through the screaming air and wraps around my dense heart making it clear and yielding. I want to be like sweat - like a film of oil on hot metal. I'm afraid for the dead. I saw nine bodies ripping the blue sky like flames traveling through paper. I saw them falling from the belly of the plane. I accept them as welts on my skin. I accept them as bruises on my heart. They are nine tools of wisdom that I can't forget. I look up through the bloody glass and I see red streaking the sky. They can read your blood and tell things about you. They can find out your secrets that way. Melt the layers of my will so that it rolls in the palm of my hand - transparent as a tear. The smoke that grimes the sky above me isn't yours. The walls around me aren't yours. My tears are yours. I lay pieces of glass on the concrete making a larger pattern each day. I feel the ground shaking beneath me. Read them. Read this back to me.

She knew that her skin was the color of air and she watched them and followed knowing that they wouldn't see her. Sometimes she took something from them - a piece of hair or a used tissue. They walked by as she stood on her corner. She watched them clutching briefcases, purses, crossed arms to shield them against the blasting air. They hurried away from her and she smiled to think how close they were to the heat of her flesh. She watched them and remembered her heat spreading over them...her skin covering them like a glove, knowing that they would wake up wary and wanting something unknown. They always walked fast, looking through her when she said, " I've been inside you. I was up inside you once... inside your house...inside you. I put my fist up inside you and I felt your heat close around me like a mouth." She remembered their houses and the rooms that they slept in. She wanted them back. She wanted to feel carpets brush the bottoms of her feet as she left the ground and settled over their sleeping bodies...like a blanket of kisses, like a vapor. She wanted to be secret again like that. She wanted a window that opened into her own eyes. Her cunt throbbed as she remembered and she dissolved into the air, becoming particles hanging there empty of thought and clean as new flesh.

Everyone of us has become a particle...dusted with the particles that drift down and cover us. Buildings are blasted out of the shapes that they held and the world carpets the ground in pieces. I spend my days walking up and down the edge of the streets pushing a

grocery cart through the particles of the day as it changes from gray dots to a wash of orange to smudged black. At the side of the cart I've fixed a rod with a hook at the end. There's a pail hanging on the hook. Inside the cart, I keep hubcaps, some food in cans, cloth and paper, some razor blades still sealed, a plastic jug of water and a salt shaker I emptied out and filled again with blood that I let drip from a cut in my arm. I sealed plastic around the top of the shaker with a rubber band pushed up under the metal top. Once a day, I take the plastic off and I wave the shaker three times over the pail. The drops fall down sputtering into the fire that I keep burning. I throw things into the pail to keep the fire burning. I keep it beside me when I sleep. I met a woman once walking near the crevice of a collapsed tunnel. She looked at me and held a finger to her mouth. She ran the tip of her finger across the scars that rimmed her lips...a set of raised dots.

"Before," she said. "My skin was cold on the inside. I wore hair inside my skin and my face hadn't started to melt. Once a week, I took a long needle and threaded it with string and I sewed my lips

together. This was the only way that I had of keeping my mouth closed so that I could hold my fingers up wet with the blood that I had wiped from my mouth and this was proof that what I said when my mouth was opened was meant by me and was true. Now I'm silent in the world. Sometimes, I scrape my tongue until it bleeds and I swallow the blood as it fills my mouth. When I speak, what I say comes out of me like an arrow." She pulled the end off a ragged

fingernail and threw it into my fire. Then she went away. Once I thought that I was connected to the false heart of the world...that this was what moved me...that this was what held me in place. Now humming fills my ears all the time. My heart fills up and then dries like a sponge. My heart moves like a piece of breath resonating against round walls. Your name comes out of my mouth. I opened myself to you. I made a mark, just here...so that you would know.

He remembered keeping dresses waiting for him in a closet. He had owned a suit, black rubber and tight. He'd felt like a snake when he had that on. Something twined and sleepy. There were gloves too and when he had put these on he felt as though he were inserting himself into another skin. He had high heeled shoes that made his feet like hooves. He couldn't walk in the shoes at all. He had to slither along the floor to get what he needed. There were things that he needed. He remembered owned things that floated inside murky bottles. He took these things out sometimes and smelled them, shifting them from one palm to the other before he put them back. He had metal balls, all different sizes that he kept in silk covered boxes. He had statues of penises and cunts made of wax and rubber and metal and he kept these ready on little pedestals scattered around the room. The room was always kept warm and it smelled clean. He remembered the makeup that he kept in smeared little tubes. He painted his eyelids and lips and the hollows of his cheeks black and then he turned on a red light in the dark room and

watched the picture that he had made reflected back at him from the mirror. He had clothes he carried with him now : a plain black dress with a long skirt, a pair of flat shoes, a scarf that he could tie around his head. He was so thin that no one noticed him when he was dressed this way. No one noticed him at all. He had saved one glove and now he kept it hidden behind a loose brick in an alley wall. He would pull it out of its hiding place and lift it to his nose and stroke it with his bare hand. He let it drop beside him as he stared ahead at the blank brick wall. His eyes were as heavy as a reptile's. His body was full of breath and the breath was slow and warm as though the sun were kissing him. He could feel his breath moving out of him and into another throbbing space...away from what moved him along the sidewalks everyday asking other people for his food.

All of us move inside fire. In this city, fire surrounds us during the day. At night, it streaks the flat sky like paint thrown across tile. I've started this again. Every minute I start again and it seems that I can't remember what had taken place before this time. I knew a woman who told me that when she was hungry, birds landed beside her on the bench where she sat and dropped popcorn or pieces of bread in her lap. Sometimes the birds brought meat...ragged chicken torn off of its bone or gray hamburger with bread clinging to it like white cotton. This woman told me that she felt as though her hair

was on fire all the time. The planet sounded loud in her ears. Cars wailed to her and when she put her ear to the ground before she went to sleep, she heard a huge machine working underneath the ground and a voice, the machine's or some other's told her that she had to stay awake or die. Everyday, she made a small slit at the tip of her finger and then she spent an hour squeezing blood from her finger into a narrow glass tube.

"I'm dried out inside," she told me. "It takes a long time to make the blood come out." She buried the tubes all over the city, wherever she could find soil to dig and make a hole. She buried them as deeply as she could thinking that the machine below the earth might grow quiet. Still, she felt the ground burning beneath her feet. This is the place where you are but we feel you like we feel the sound inside a bell. We are empty and we burn from the inside out so that our skins begin shining at night. I sleep at night in an empty pool. The pool stands in the center of an abandoned hotel lobby. Parts of the building are shattered now and lie crumbled like cake around the sections left standing. Animals live here now, moving and breathing inside the rusted kitchen, the wild tendrily greenhouse and the creaking gym that still smells like the sweat of travelers gone and dead. At the shallow end of the pool stretches a banner drooping at one end that says "Welcome, South-Atlantic Data/Con." Sand covers the bottom of the pool, packed hard underneath with a loose surface that shifts forming dunes and valleys. I sleep on top of the sand heat at night and during the day, I walk around on top of it. I follow a band of light that stripes the pool's wall and moves as the hours change and the sun circles pillars ringing the hotel lobby. I paint signs on the pool walls a little at a time moving from one lighted band to another during the day. I started at the bottom and now the walls are covered to the height of my shoulder with marks that I've put there, marks that were red and then quickly turned brown in the air. I use blood that I collect everyday in a cracked teacup from a wound that I keep open on my left ankle. We are empty and every empty moment is a sound made. A drum is hollow inside. A sphere is hollow inside until it fills up with sounds. The ceiling has fallen through leaving an egg shaped hole draped with kudzu - a green frame for the flat, blue sky above. One day, shadows fell across my work, and I looked up through the roof. I saw nine bodies falling there, floating like petals made dark in the sun. I looked at them moving away from the glittering body of the plane and I felt my own body revolving in the air above a silent planet. I turned back to the wall of the swimming pool and in the story that I told there, I took the body surrounding my heart and I smoothed it out like clay. Nine stars surrounded me and points of light pierced my heart...silent now and filled.

She took the hand in her own and brought it to her lips. She licked the blood out of the wound dimpled at the center of the palm. The scent of roses surrounded her and the skin that she licked tasted fresh and clean...more like a leaf of mint would taste and not coppery and salted like the blood filmed skin of others. She took the other hand and pressed her lips to the wound there. This was a moment she remembered because she had dreamed it when she had lived inside walls. She'd slept in a bed that she owned. The sheets twisted around her throbbing body all night and when she woke up she had cried because the dream was sealed in a box that she couldn't open. She didn't believe in the boy standing at the end of the alley. He was standing in the place where she slept now, open to the sky above and crawling with insects at night. There he was, ten years old, maybe and as clean as a penny. She waited for him to waver and dissolve as her stood blinking in front of her. He shifted his feet in the trash that lined the bottom of the alley and he held his hands up to her. She kissed each one. She touched his head, fragile as an egg and bleeding from the holes that pierced the skin and made a ribbon around it. Her hand touched his side where another wound stood open. She pushed her fingers into the wound and felt it pulse around her. She was crying and she felt the movement of her tears all through her and down into the center of her cunt. His feet had left the paper stained with bright red. She moved the paper away and found the pale feet tinged with blue and delicate as fish with bleeding holes gaping up at her. She went to her knees and pressed her mouth against each wound. She took in the fragrance of crushed berries and she felt the hunger that twisted her stomach go away. She felt clean again and as happy as an animal sleeping inside a warm room. She held the bleeding boy against her. She was on her

knees, her cheek pressed against the wound in his side and she could hear his heart beating out of him and into her.

"Don't leave me," she whispered. "Don't leave me now."

I sleep at night in the webs that twisted metal makes as it climbs out of crumbled cement. I climb the tower of the ruined building going higher everyday. One touch from you makes a sound like a bell and knits all the stars together. The world is such a large place. What I believe is that the metal I climb has been stretched out to meet the world and that I can do that too. If I stretch out my hand far enough, I might meet you. At night, I squeeze into the smallest niche that I can find and I hang there and I sleep. The rusted metal bruises and colors my skin. I dream about twisted metal and wheels of fire in the sky. I wake up at night and I see the sky, the stars spinning clean above smoke and pain. I make signs to you with my hands. I carry a nail with me and each night I dig it into my right hand until blood fills my palm like it was a cup. I hold this up and then turn it down and I let the blood fall to the ground. I know that skin can speak and I feel waves leaving the surface of mine and flowing up to you like a river. I sleep with you inside a rusted cradle. I know that everything in the world has a name.

She had lived behind glass for so long. She remembered spending all of her time in warm rooms...one room after another...the

cameras moving in and away from her and again as if they would like to eat her but unsure if they could. She spoke to the lenses and she felt eyes looking back at her. The heat from the eyes warmed her blood. She remembered feeling warm all the time. She had been filled and rested...draping herself like a cat across clean soft furniture. She had been clean and soft and nothing revealed the sharp blade that twisted inside of her. She wanted to go up to the cameras and smear them with lipstick and lick the glass with her tongue, but the cameras were never tuned off. Every moment that she lived she knew how close she was to becoming her skin and nothing else. She was grateful now because nothing seemed different. She recognized glass when she saw it - a dark throb would start inside of her. She put paper and rags on the floor and around the walls of a brick cubicle that she found. She found a dingy piece of scratched plexiglass too and she tilted it so that it stood almost flat against the edges of the brick box. She stayed inside most of the day, looking out at the others that moved by and looked in to see her... naked and dirty, ribs and pelvic bones jutting out of the blue skin...cracked lips moving silently behind the transparent shield. She saw light inside the skin of her belly as it moved up and down.

The sun flows into the glass and I feel my heart open up like a blade has touched it and gone through. The sun is brighter than I remember.