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AID
You find me soft, cozy in myself. The violet velvet jumper, too small for my torso, is off to one side. The cunt in my head too is small and violet. I'm wet from the bath. You put your hand on my neck. Your other hand is flat on my stomach. The hair on my ears is there. You push down. I breathe out. You take your hand off my stomach and take that little hand out of your pocket. Your other hand is still on my neck. You pin me there and touch my cheek with the little hand. You touch my lips. The little hand is smooth and cold. The big hand on my neck is grit. You find my ear. The rim of it. The little magician's hand gets behind it. I hear it tracing me. It sounds like earth. You move it, rimming me, the folds. You lean in. You turn my head to the side with your thumb. You blow across the back of my neck. You blow on my temple. You set the little hand down palm up on the nightstand where I can see it. I'm looking at it as you blow on my ear. I shake. The little black arm with the hard white glove.
With your rough hand half on my neck and half on my face pinning my head to the side, you reach down for your bag and place it on the bed where I can't see it. I hear you open it one-handed and spread it apart. I hear the items shift over each other. You remove something and then it's quiet. My ear is open, up.
You blow on it again, my ear, as if lubricating it. You press in the AID, the sound of it entering me. You turn it on with your little remote and get still.
A whoosh shift. I hear the air in the room open. I hear the furnace, the refrigerator. Movies. I can hear you breathing through your nose. Everything's bright. I hear floorboards, all of them. Traffic. The wind pressed against the window. The wind dragging in the street. Little pops of sound in the trees. An aquarium somewhere. Voices. A toilet stops refilling. Your breathing cracks.
You take your hand off my neck and bring it to where my eyes are focused just above the open palm of the toy hand. The space above the little hand is charged with the hand's charisma: "Welcome. Behold." You make a fist there then slowly sign the letters S T A Y.
You reach into your bag. It sounds like turning a closet upside down. I hear you take hold of something. You bring it in front of me to the stage above the little hand: Tallgrass Prairie Wildflowers: A Falcon Field Guide. Ladd and Oberle. A tight little thing. I know it well. You show me the back. More than 320 color Photographs. Precise descriptions of 295 species. Habitat/range information. I anticipate the rush of it. You climb on top of me and press your knee into my back. The springs moan in the ear that's pressed to the mattress and squeal in the turned-up ear with the AID. You lean over me and blow on my neck, on my voice box. I hear your breath loud from in me. My legs clench and release. You hold the book over my augmented open ear and shift more of your weight into me. I exhale.
As the air is pressed out of me the sound enters. A violent, enormous purring pours into me like bats down a chimney. The dryness of it undoes me right away, makes me gush hard for the duration: Field Milkwort, Common Cinquefoil, Shooting Star, Skeleton Weed… The words pop and scatter through me… Rose Vervain, Obedient Plant, Barbara's Buttons, American Vetch, Prairie Phlox, Marsh Phlox, Goat's Rue, Violet Wood Sorrel, Rough Buttonweed, Flowering Spurge… Each page spits its consonants off the coarse skin of your thumb… Prairie Sundrops, Sneezeweed, Kitten Tails, Fringed Puccoon!… Fringed Puccoon peaks me. The torrent of English names in their bold font is the crispest layer within the deafening propellor of turning pages. Beneath it, like a talkative audience, the Latin chatters through: Eupatorium maculatum, Mondora citriodora, Coreopsis grandiflora, Physostegia virginiana, Allium stellatum, Hypericum drummondii… Then quieter still, the confused whisper of description, partial and maniacal: Low grey-hairy leafless green calyx petals flanking late spring tapering headed hooded finely hairy bullet-shaped central lip shoots early fall diskless five moist narrow aromatic hooded aromatic purple corollas to spreading notched upper petals divided wide open rays and two flanking keel-like lips to open ground…
The sound is fractal. The twelve or so seconds that it takes you to fan through the pages feels like five or six minutes. The orgasming fucks with time too. As soon as the back cover snaps off your hand you turn off the AID with your remote and my convulsions reverberate into the external silence. You bury my head with a pillow and brace down to contain me. The spasms shake out over the next minute or so and become gradually calmer as the echo of spinning language dissolves in me. You remove the pillow.
My eyelids part like dry lips. The little plastic hand is still there, open, smiling, ready to introduce the next act.