I hate how without Daddy I am a book with one bookend, so I just fall and my words get crushed. I hate it how Daddy is a petty thief. Because if he steals what’s petty, then what am I when he takes me? I hate how Daddy makes me sputter inarticulate phrases, so that I choke out sounds that have nothing to do with theory. I hate how Daddy makes me write him stories, because I cannot sculpt a sentence out of cock. I hate it how that word becomes so eloquent inside of me, pushing through me and out of my mouth.
I hate how Daddy’s cock knows the way to hidden quarries, the watery places that were mined. How Daddy sees the drunken dives that kill sixteen, euphoric girls kissed to epiphanies on their mossy knees. Sophomoric girls getting their nipples touched on their mossy knees. And the skin scraped against sharp things, and the rustle of cops approaching, and the second before the kids run, and the hastily abandoned trunks. How he knows what to do about each truncated fuck. Of each lifetime. Daddy takes care of things.
I hate it how Daddy makes me need his cock. Because then I am a place that once held diamonds, sitting home yearning for him, waiting for a girl’s new best friend. Because then I am always too ready for him. So hungry every time his key turns in the lock. So hungry for that handcuff sound of his key in the lock. So hungry for that four o’clock, drowsy, sharp sound. I hate it how Daddy walks in and feels me to see if I’m wet, and wonders what I anticipate, and then ignores me while removing his jacket. I hate it how those fingers on my pussy make me whimper like a little dog.
I hate how seconds turn to hours before Daddy leads me into the bedroom, and his belt buckle glints like it’s submerged. How sweetly Daddy takes my hand and says, “Baby girl,” and then pulls me to his denim lap. And how the things to be filled must be emptied, must be stripped. Daddy grips me and undoes me and lowers me to the bed. And I shiver because I need it. I give when Daddy pushes. Daddy pulls on my hair.
I hate how good and raw he strips me. How good it feels to be this bare.
The Rock Wall
Every night I go back to the rock wall. It is covered in moss and the rain is drizzling and I search for grips. I am ripped and mud-covered and hungry. My grasp is tenuous and my fingers are slipping. I’m tired of being a wide-eyed waif always scrambling over walls where there are more walls and more slippery rocks and more places to bruise and nowhere good to land. The rain is so irritating, the noise, the noise that’s always a soft fuck when you need it hard, that’s always a drizzle when you need a thunderstorm to break the air and shock the animals so they run frenzied—wild—crazed—scattershot—into spaces they never dared to go. The wall is unforgiving and I begin to slide. I land on my knees in a muddy pool and my dress is ripped and I’m old and there is no Daddy. The landing is soft. Nothing impaling me. Nothing tearing me and ripping me. No fairy-tale wolves, though I always thought they would be there, their dripping incisors and hunger, waiting for me to fall. There is nothing to wound me, no imaginary battles to reenact. No hole in the earth to open up and swallow me there.
Maybe I am already in the hole. Maybe I am the hole. This dark and damp place that feels like the inside and not the outside and my dress is ripped and I start crying. I hold my face in my muddy hands and my tears clean my hands and my hands smear the mud into my tears. Everything undoes everything. Nothing undoes me. Nothing does me.
Then suddenly, so dark and quick and I can’t even scream, something reaches from behind and grabs me with its arm under my throat and drags me backward, and drags me while whispering things. “Daddy’s here now, little girl. Daddy’s got you.” He’s not comforting and not scary, just unsettling, just the kind of thing that makes me all animal, all animal splitting from the pack the way the wolves want it to be, all animal confused and asking for it. I try to flail around and pull away. I try to break the grip, the wall is waiting. Doesn’t Daddy understand the wall? How I need to climb it always, climb and climb and climb it? Daddy pulls my muddy body so that I’m sitting on his lap and I still can’t see him but I feel his hard cock. “Daddy’s got you,” he says again.
I want not to want it. I want not to feel how my thighs are smeared with mud and my pussy feels smeared, but it’s not, it’s just mine. There is nothing between my pussy and his cock but a thin layer of fabric. And he is rubbing his cock against my panties and I squirm. I want to squirm away but he rubs me so hard and I start to want to push down onto him. I start to push down as if the fabric will just dissolve. He pushes the tip of his cock against the fabric and the fabric goes into me. And the elastic of my panties follows the fabric and pulls me, pulls my legs, into me. I’m going to fall into me. I have to fight. I try to struggle but Daddy holds me against his moving pushing cock. “Daddy, wait,” I say, but I keep pushing to make the fabric go away, and I want him. “Daddy, stop!” Daddy grabs under my arms and pushes me slowly forward so that my face is down but he pulls my hips back. “Daddy wants you to take his cock,” he says. “All of it. Can you be a good girl and do that?”
I want to taste the mud. The mud smells oddly like Daddy. Daddy slides my panties down my legs so I’m just there in the night air and my pussy and my ass are high up behind me. “Daddy, no,” I say, but this time weakly. This time it’s all reverse psychology. This time I’m not sure at all.
“Daddy can just leave you here in the mud if you want, little girl. Is that what you want?” He snarls this.
“Daddy…no,” I say. “No, please, no.”
“Beg for what you want.”
“I want you, Daddy.”
“Beg me.”
“I want Daddy. I want Daddy to fill me up.”
“Daddy’s very hard for you. Is this what you want?” He slides the tip of his cock into me. “Is this what you want?”
“Yes, Daddy. Please.”
“Beg me.”
“I want you inside of me. Please.”
“What?”
“I want you, Daddy, please.” I say it with the urgency I use to climb the walls.
Daddy starts sliding his cock into my pussy and I push back onto him but he holds my hips and makes me wait for him. And the rain gets harder, the drops batter my cheeks, the rain turns everything to mud while Daddy fills me up and my hands slide in front of me for something to hang on to but there is nothing, nothing there, nothing but my hips pushing back and Daddy’s hard cock and my need. And I need to hold something. I need to hold on because I am used to holding and I need the wall and Daddy pushes in so hard and I want to scream, it feels so good. My hands are fumbling forward for any handhold but there is nothing there….
“Daddy’s got you, baby,” he says soothingly. “Fall back into me.”
Gravel
The gravel reminds me of old roads cutting between fields to deserted places, the way it clatters and then hums, keeps me unsteady. Once I cut my chin on the gravel in the Dairy Queen parking lot, holding onto my Dilly Bar all the way to the ground. I remember losing my footing, bleeding on the car upholstery, wondering if kids found reddened chunks of rock where I landed. I think about all of these things now, now that I’m old being young, riding next to Daddy in the truck. The big wheels slide over the gravel. The dark moves from beneath trees to the sides of buildings. We are near a warehouse with broken windows. And the gravel is not the kind you buy in bags at Home Depot, but stained. I get out and stumble like a tipsy slut. I straighten my skirt and start to walk but Daddy is there already, and he grabs my arm. “No,” he says, pointing. “You little whore. Right here.”
I look down distastefully, then up at Daddy. “Here?” I sneer. I can’t believe he means it. The rock is soaked dark with things dying, bled oil and shoe rubber. I look at him again, his stern expression, then kneel down. The rocks are sharp against my knees. Daddy gives a little push on my back so I fall forward and my palms slide through the rocks. Then, when I’m on all fours, he pulls up my skirt from behind, just flips the material so that it lands on my back and I feel the breeze trying to go into me. I’ve got no panties on.
“Such a pr
etty little ass,” he says. “Untainted lily-white ass. Not dirty like the rest of you.” The breeze seems to follow the current of his voice and rubs the goose bumps on my ass. “Are you afraid to have Daddy’s big cock in your pretty ass?”
“Maybe,” I say. I feel defiant. I feel the way the rocks are cutting me and I don’t move my hands.
Daddy’s hands fondle my asscheeks, spread them open, press against them so I slide forward more. He’s so much stronger than I am. I let myself fall and feel the rocks against my cheek. I think of how I fell that time, when I was young, and tried to taste my blood. And how I always tried to taste my blood when I got cut. But what I liked to taste was not just mine, but also that which made me bleed. It was the thing that made the cut, the flavor mixed into the blood. It was the combination of the two, the grit that touched the cutter and the flesh. It was the generosity of both, and how my bleeding made the two combine. I think of all of this while Daddy moves his cock against the hole, and pushes hard because it’s tight.
He pushes hard because it’s tight, and pulls my hips against him. My face gets scraped against the gravel. My lip begins to bleed. I taste the blood and salt and earth and pain and fear and trampling. I taste the blood and all that has been done to it and lick and give it back to me. I give me back to me. And Daddy gives me, too.
“Who gives you what you need?” he asks. The natural light has fled. A streetlight shines behind his hair. I smell the tires. I smell the dew. I feel the walls that crumble into gravel. I feel the girls who must undo.
“Daddy,” I say. He looks like a monument. “You do.”
BECOMING STONE
Sandra Lee Golvin
Summer is becoming. Gone to Africa says A. Now you on the blue couch becoming my fist. My arm becoming the cradle. Your hair becoming the yellow dream.
I did dream you another summer. I was trying to decide about my life. I was believing in the I of decision making. I was believing in the I of dreaming. Now that I does not know so much and would say you dreamed me or perhaps the dream dreamed us both. An old lady’s corpse was being kissed. In the kissing she became you, the fairy tale princess. Someday my prince(ss) will becoming. I will becoming her. Or him. We had not yet met, my I and yours. Not then. Not that summer.
You were wearing chocolate panties. Even now, with my fist inside, the wet silk wraps my wrist at the place where it wants cutting open. You let me be the one who knows. I so wanted that. I have a chocolate dick, the one A never liked because it looked too real. You don’t mind though. You’re such a girl. Until you, being the girl was my job.
When you first approached I had no way to understand. You, all Midwest blonde, the wife and mother, legs long as prairie sky. Can you hear the longing for what I thought could never be mine? Me, the frog, my lipstick androgyny a cover for what only you saw living in stone.
You would chip away my protection bit by bit until I knelt naked before you in an attitude of wanting. I did not make your job easy any more than the stone yields to the chisel with the first blow. No, persistence was required, and more than that, desire. Inexorably you made me, a me who I did not know was there. Is the figure the creation of the artist or is it hidden there in rock, only waiting to be revealed? Am I now what you imagined, or was I always so?
It’s not only the change in clothes, the end of dresses and wide-brimmed hats. My hips have narrowed, my jaw grown more square, suddenly I know how to let my gaze linger on the pretty girl as if I might presume to know her. And my friends, those few who remain, do not recognize me. All of this I want to say you wrought. Lady of alchemy, Aphrodite of dreams.
Another one last night, another not able to reach you. You were in a Presbyterian hospital by the sea. You had given birth to our daughter. Things are breaking all around me. Things made of glass like the nautilus you brought me from Paris after you already knew you were done with me. (That week with your mother rendered me an impossibility.) Still months later I dream of you and my hand awakens hot, curled in on itself, bereft of you.
Jealous of my own fist. It knows something I never will. Your wet heat imprinted in traces at the grooves that mark the knuckles. My palm forever empty of the sweet, flat place at the base of your spine. My thighs that held the curve of your ass, lonely. I never held a woman that way before. Don’t you see?
I was your mother, your boylover, and you my midwife, my child.
There was A, for many years my man. I’d been faithful to her. You had your husband and two sons, your woman lovers on the side (you’d brought them out). For nine months I refused to be one of them. You always got what you wanted, on your terms. This time you wanted a real dyke. I needed terms of my own.
Then A went to Africa.
When the sculptor works with stone, a long time passes where nothing shows. There is a circling and a tapping, and it is all an act of faith. Then comes a moment, seemingly out of nowhere, in which what has been only surface and raw edges suddenly becomes the thing that was always there. The soul in the stone unfolds.
I don’t want to tell this story. Once it is written it is over. I can’t bear that. When the phone rings I still imagine it might be you. When it is silent I wonder why you do not call. How ridiculous I am.
The moment.
You didn’t come to class, and we exchanged angry messages. I remember I called you chickenshit. You gave it right back. Your temper opened up the place in me where violence fuels my sex. It felt good, the lust and the killing rage. Made it possible for me to say I humble myself and demand your presence at the same time. You liked that and came to find me at the beach. As I told you to do. In the parking lot I didn’t say hello, just pulled your head down to mine and gave you the kiss you’d been wanting. What I wanted was to fuck you there in public. I didn’t. I made you demonstrate your desire though, all the way back to my house, and a man on a bicycle rode by calling, “Lovers, yoohoo, lovers” like an enchanted bird.
I made you wait on the blue couch while I searched for the poem. The one by Judy Grahn where Ereshkegal Butch Queen of the Underworld dares Inanna Queen of Beauty to face her secret want. This is you, I said, Queen of Beauty. And you were, too, so lovely in the shock of what you had provoked in me. I grabbed your hair, that blonde mane, tight and read to you. Do you remember the words?
Strange to everyone but me that you would leave the great green rangy heaven of the american dream, your husband and your beloved children, the convenient machines, the lucky lawn and the possible picture window—to come down here below. You left your ladyhood, your queenship, risking everything, even a custody suit, even your sanity, even your life. It is this that tells me you have a warrior living inside you. It is for this I could adore you.
My fist is remembering the rough of your hair.
You cried as I forced your face down into my lap. Being a dyke isn’t fun and games, baby. It’s serious business. It’s warrior business. Like the poem says. I think you complained then, that I was being hard on you. You should thank me for that, I shook you, thank me for caring enough not to play your little secret on the side. For caring enough to try to bring you down here, to my world. To where you want to be. You cried some more. And then you thanked me. You did.
You were the most beautiful to me then, all your perfect passing prettiness stripped away by real grief.
Was that when you bared your belly, so that I could witness the site of your devastation? Not only the scars of childbirth, but the ravages of bulimia, the muscles destroyed by years of laxatives and vomit. I thought of napalm, dead places too poisoned for anything to live, and I believed I understood something about the price of your fortune.
You were a connoisseur, bred for private jets and crystal. I was proud you’d picked me. Cocky. At one point—not that first night, but soon—I put Mick Jagger on and danced for you to “Gimme Shelter.” We all need someone we can cream on, he sang. Baby, you squirmed with so much delight I thought I was king of the world. You had the power to put me there. And to take me down. You
were the Queen of Beauty, after all.
I wouldn’t let you touch me. I don’t know how I knew to do that.
Not much happened that first night. You remembered your boys whom you’d dumped at a neighbor’s for a minute, not knowing I had other plans. I didn’t like it, you leaving in the middle of a scene. You begged for a return engagement the next night, and I said I’d think about it. In the morning you called, and I told you what to wear. A dress with a full skirt. No underwear. A more interesting bra. You confessed you’d thrown out all your sexy bras and bought plain ones because you thought that’s what lesbians like. Since you were trying to please me I forgave you. But I was clear. I wanted you in lace.
So cool and yet out of my mind. What was happening to me? My hands, my hands, my hands do all the remembering.
I put on my man’s suit. You swooned at the door. Trousers, you whispered, eyeing me in a way no girl ever had before. I said we’re going out in public. Your assignment is to let everyone know you are with me. That you’re mine. We went to the Pleasure Chest. We looked at dildos and porn. I said I need to know what you like. You fumbled, dropped your keys, acted silly. Then I took you to an upscale industry panel on gay parenting. The kind of thing I hate. But I endured it because I wanted you to see there were people like you with children and money. I wanted you to be able to imagine a life with me.
I think that was the night I danced for you. Yes, I’m sure of it now. You got on your knees in front of me, undid my slacks. It was a mistake to let you touch me. I knew it right away but didn’t know how to stop. You went home to your husband, and I raged all night, feverish to find my way back to that place of power I’d let slip away under the stroke of your fingers.
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