Barf, Sexually
by Sophie Sills | Illustrated by Frank Scott Krueger
Originally published in Issue 06 of Manor House Quarterly: POST-.
I worry about apathy. First I worry about my brain atrophying from not reading enough, then apathy, then about missing myself think because I was watching myself be startled by bad TV. Over and over again I watched myself be startled and offended by bad TV. I worry that I love it.
I worry that I would like to watch you dismount the rifle for a cleaning. That it’s a private road and I worry I’m giving access. When I ignore the cause and effect of important incursions, interceptions, wreckages and remains, I give a type access. I worry that my brain is glowing bluely and echoes with the waltz of intermittent static.
Besides bad TV, I read online about home remedies for dandruff, and if tea tree oil is good for canker sores in the mouth. And if it will cure athletes’ foot, and if athletes’ foot can be cured or if it is like dandruff, that reoccurs unluckily. I heard that a gluten free diet might help. But it won’t help for everyone.
I sit at a desk regularly for too long, too many hours and you can’t make up for that kind of sitting, when your cells start to believe the body is going into hibernation or dying, the cells prepare for death. You can’t make up for the damage even if you go home and weight-lift and run and strain. That scientific study was conclusive and it says that sitting is just like smoking, and you can’t make up for bad health with good health. If you sit like that, sorry, you just won’t live as long.
I worry that I leave the cat alone for too long, too many hours a day while I’m away, sitting, also for too long, alone with my case of stagnancy and cellular dimming. They say that if you have a pet, the pet needs other animals to keep him company, but you shouldn’t own pets in the first place because animals weren’t meant to be our friends or children, domesticated, over-bred and under-wanted, but neither were people supposed to be these things.
I can’t remember from experience what is supposed to be, and who can I trust to know something? Not astrophysicists, with their oblivions so full of fire and empty of gravity. I worry about black holes and black matter and empty eye sockets.
I wonder what understandings are folded behind my cat’s quiet eyes. A stunning directness that I will never know as a human being. Human beings are a type of animal vulgarity. They like to tame, go into debt and at their best are beseeched, not comforted, by their own quiet patience.
Remember when we removed the cat’s claws? He turned so grumpy and sad and was never the same. Cats need to knead. We don’t know why. Once in LA, I had a neighbor who left cat shit on my doorstop and I yelled at her, “You are a HORRIBLE person. You are a HORRIBLE person.” I am a horrible person. She dragged her feet like two dead sausages to the laundry room endless times a day, but still I can’t forgive her. I can’t forgive myself.
Declawing is actually a procedure that removed his first knuckles, preventing him from ever kneading again. We can’t understand as human beings. I want to spread butter on the tender black pads of his feet and eat them. I worry it is exploitation. Is this deliberate or is it love? It isn’t rational; it’s physical. Sexual? I’m irked. Can I eat it?
Once, I drove across the bridge to the Headlands. I saw San Francisco lonesome across the water. It vibrated, surrounded. A gorgeous wound incised in my chest so that the loneliness of closeness bubbled out like ink on the sunset. Like a pipe, leaky with love and harm. It was sad. Actually, so sad. An amazing contrast. I worry about desire. It is cold in San Francisco and I want the city to be in my body, close the chill and exhaustion with a hail fire I tend to carry inside me naturally. I also want the city in my body to burn the lonely loiterers out. I’ve held their damp eyes in my mouth so long.
Parasites, fungal infections, loiterers. This city, like a type of island, can grow inside your own body. Think of it as a cellular cluster, dimming as it multiplies.
I worry about duplicity and indecency and all the small and large scale villains carried through life like seeds in the wind. Though the dream smells like flowers it tastes like ash. I remember once in San Jose there was a guy who had a pet snake. It wasn’t dangerous. Everyday he fed it treats of living creatures, tiny mice. One day the snake died. His roommate complained because he tossed it in the trash can under the kitchen sink. Funerals are important.
I prefer the slinky atmosphere of sleep.
Sometimes I want to open a window and show myself. Here are my breasts. You can fondle them if you let me be cruel and destroy myself a little bit. When I am cruel, something false shifts inside me so that I come more into my being. It looks like porcelain blushing.
My nature is made of varying gravities. It’s hard to tell how long it will take me to stop falling. Sometimes I feel both heavy and light, like a burning tree with fat boughs of desire, picking up the singe, turning to ash, then getting gone on the breeze of a bougainvillea colored dream where I am the mother to everything needy. I tell Frank I want to have a baby. I want it so badly I could parse sharp from the dull with pelvic thrusts. Break the meaty vaults open to spread butter on and eat the rawest cuts and bloody limbs of former lovers.
A sea bloats within me. Wanting a baby is an opulent constipation type of desire. Do you know the despair of constipation?
Comparing other physical experiences to shitting is useful. Ina May Gaskin is known for making alternative birthing positions easy to understand for people who want or need women to lie on their backs, she says, “would you lie on your back to defecate?” I pant shallowly like a dog making a quiet birth alone. I have no children, but I lie in bed at night and make this argument to part of myself that fears I’m too vulgar to be of instinct or animal. Part of me fears I’ll only birth tail-less cats with clubbed paws. At night in bed, lying not asleep, feasting on cruelty, disquiet shifts in my abdomen.
Often when I have insomnia, I worry does Bernie Madoff feel regret? I know this is stupid. What about when his son committed suicide? Did he feel it then? No. I can’t forgive him. I can’t forgive myself. Then I’m off riding some crest into dark country.
I fear the total darkness, especially of sudden physical blindness, as I imagine or pretend it to be. Sometimes I pretend not to be able to hear or see and I worry what it would be like to be Helen Keller. She must have felt like a satellite in so much abyss. At least she could feel the enclosure of her mom’s arms around her. Unless that feels like adding weight to a sort of always drowning state? In an abyss what part of the abyss isn’t drowning? I fear outer space and space voyage even without thinking about Helen Keller. It is a feeling of vast claustrophobia. In outer space, wandering is so thick; it is a standstill.
I remember the first morning in Los Angeles Frank looked at me naked, he said that the beauty marks on my body made me look more naked. I would like to unhinge from my physical body and follow along the dream of my skin by these road signs. I want to be half asleep and more naked. A brighter rendering of my natural shames. This includes my dreams that begin as lesbian fantasies until she produces a little penis where a clit should be and then I lose interest.
Also, I want to publish an entire manuscript full of my spelling errors because someone owes it to us to admit that we can’t or won’t forgive people who misspell, no matter how smart they are. I worry that is actually guilt for a greater failure. Any one of us could have ended up that way, but THANK God it’s him, not me. I could have been born any way. I can’t forgive myself for this.
It’s not enough. How is calcium absorbed? I heard that when you jump up and down, this helps. And vitamin D can help, even though vitamin supplements have been debunked. I mean, if vitamin supplements worked, wouldn’t everyone take them? I don’t know. I remember when I was a kid my mom taught me to put Aloe Vera plant on a burn and that is one of the few home remedies I know.
My brain is full of forgotten passwords. I worry that an accumulation of deleted sentences in my brain acts like a landfill infinitely spreading filth into fresher earth. If forgetting looked like something it would be overgrown pubic hair. Like black cobwebs. Too much pubic hair is ugly, I’m told, and sometimes I want a barbershop for what’s ugly. I know it is stupid and like bad spelling and everything arbitrary. Still, I can’t forgive myself.
Then I stood in my own empty eye-sockets and screamed because I could not taste you without my eyeballs.
For a second, I forgot that you were you and I was me.
But, the point is loneliness. Or, what to do about the fact that some of the houseplants are dying while others aren’t. Everyone I ask about how to save the houseplants doesn’t know, because everyone I know is just like me, and together we know nothing. I realize that no plant is supposed to be a houseplant. Houseplants were never meant to be our pets or children. I worry that the misguided raising of houseplants is a congenial type of torture. Why did we all agree or assume that its OK to deprive them of fresh air, helpful insects and to feed them diluted sunlight.
It’s romantic as a vulture.
I worry about presumption, duplicity, and total blindness. I also worry about animals that suffer from loneliness and babies that aren’t held enough. It is easy to worry about small and large-scale villains to avoid the creeping moss that would cover everything if it could. I mean, when it does. It is easy to worry about spelling. I mean, you can’t really teach people how to wash their spirit of ash and radio utterance.
I don’t want to discipline my cat. I understand subordination best when I sit in Los Angeles freeway traffic. Traffic subordination is a luxury, but still a type of constipation. A dead butterfly spreads in my throat like a type of unsettled hunger; it worries me. Disquiet shifts in me everywhere.
I worry about the thick bowels of all the Los Angeles drivers. What is the average/normal amount of times a person should shit a day? I want babies like I really need to take a shit. Instead I sell shelters made of flimflam. When my cat eats grass I blame myself.
I worry about empathy. My filtration system is made of ancient lace. It floats somewhere above me. And it’s unredeemable. At night, I cannot stop thinking about the schoolteacher who fed his body fluids to little children with sweet faces like tangerines. I think about how he touched them with a hole that grows as it burns. I also think about how the ancient Romans kept their beasts starved and in complete darkness for a week before their fight, and then the beasts had to be lured from their cells because they were too frightened and confused by the cheering crowds of the Coliseum.
We have always been a type of cruelty. Sexy, meat-glutted with an appetite for repeated acts of perjury. Even love is cloaked in spermy webs and old desires. We are made of our tangerine-faced adolescent selves’ sexual mistakes.
I am haunted by the mistrust I inflicted on my childhood cat. I didn’t know I was also a beast.
We forget that beasts are still part of the big system. We make ourselves singular and special, separate from the big system. And we singularly are cruel.
We malign, collude, forget how to care for the beasts.
I worry about the uncared for. It’s prickly when I inhale because I’m sick with porousness. Also, overly bothered when I hear a baby cry. The pitch and insistence is meant to disturb, I know. It hurts and I want to eat it. I can clean it with my tongue, and use saliva as a natural balm. No one chooses her dreams or invasions, the bodily and/or otherwise incursions.
Being porous, and/or insane is somehow not separate from any other way of knowing. Even if the moonlight drives your mind deep in the dusty gray dunes. Even if you’re waiting inside a thought you will never uncover.
I can’t tell if being insane does or does not deprive consciousness. I mean, our gut feeling.
I’m without hope for. Like a useless old sheep, I wear a blanket of limited idioms.
Because something is real does not make it alive.
I tried to come inside when the sky got dark with rain. But I walked through the front door and out the back. One ate the other, so that I stepped out the door and fell down the throat into the stomach where it started to rain. Everything that is inside is dry, warm, and steady. The inside zipped itself away or folded into a pocket made of another stomach. We are a series of stomachs. It burns and I want to eat it.
I worry about athletes’ foot and dandruff and recurring illnesses, and illnesses becoming overly familiar. Pharmacies and holes that grow. Sometimes I forget to wear my face and where it should be is only membrane. The membrane slowly turns black.
I bring the perverse inside, take in the unliving and make it alive. Breathe into it and the unliving swallows my breath. It is urged along my circulatory system. I grow branches of the unliving-made-living and I calcify.
Sometimes, I have a head cold and can’t breathe right, so I lie on the bed, panting shallowly like a dog giving birth, quiet and alone.
We forgot to have the dog fixed until she started building nests around the house and her nipples became enlarged. It was sad, that silence and patient waiting.
Frank and I believe I experienced a false pregnancy. I googled false pregnancy and it said that a woman can have it when she very much wants to get married. It later mentioned how it can happen to a woman who also very much wants to become pregnant. I worried about being too much like a dog, but I worry more about the corridors that lead to chambers that become cells multiplying, and are so deep and dark that even the hounds can get lost in them.
I worry about getting lost in the human and unhuman labyrinth of wanting, waiting, and the arrival of diseases.
I get away from me too often. Remember when I forget you were you and I was me? I mean, I think I might also be you.
Sometimes I like to wear my ass as my face instead of a porcelain mask blushing or a slowly blackening membrane, and it helps with all this worrying. Let’s all wear our ass as our face and blame it on a climate of apathy.
I can’t handle this lady on TV
Telling the audience to listen to the stars
To listen, through the blue sea of forever for
The signals transmitted by “cosmic company”
In their afterimage we’ll know own our fate
I find this rude, frankly, and a waste of NASA’s money
Because suffering continues to invade the souls of
this world
Carrying them along
Their desperate beams like the yellow, perennial blossoms
Bobbing along the tendrils of tansies
That we’ve planted, but won’t maintain
She says, they can teach us intelligent compassion
But, don’t you see how narcissistic?
Or lazy
To search for a better version
Of ourselves instead of just making better versions
From what we already are
It’s free
Also, has anyone ever taught you compassion
That what unlocks in the chest
And moves with speed through the bones is not physical
They tell me the atmosphere is made of gases
But it still looks like milk
Compassion is like the 12 step program
Where you have to be willing to accept responsibility
Where something shifts and you see
That it’s all up to you, alone
Sometimes I remember that feeding
One hungry person one meal
Likely means a lot to that person
It’s perspective
We are all made of water
Drifting through the blue sea of forever
And you are here
Though it can’t be observed from far above
Where the universe is infinitesimal
And stretched like a long lithe stomach
Swimming with silver fish
Housing every soul that ever suffered
In a particle the size of a grain of sand
