by Marina Kris
(10/29/08)

"There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that
may only be traversed by his longing" --Kahlil Gibran

With Kev's erection trellising the silver stud blooming from the bowl of my navel, I butterfly my knees open the better to take it in. All the while his seed is struggling to enter where he is rhythm and splitting rock and wave and crash and we are bed sheet and fingertip and tangle and tense then release, there is a seed already taken hold. Bare feet lace bare feet across the damp mattress. baby it murmurs in the back of my brain, baby where already I can feel it hurricane hum as we toss and take, as we writhe. He does not reach for the packet in our bedside table, I do not remind him.

Already there's a lush fullness crackling under the skin, my belly, once concave now convex as if these lips swollen that took in his tongue, his ear, his skin on my skin now had chosen not only to swallow whole eggs and balls of chalky peppermint bubblegum but whole globes, the spinning kind we had in Mrs. Golden's Kindergarten. The kind we stood, our patent leather shoes in tiptoes by the window yawning open so pendulously to spin those honey-marmalade places, grown, we'd never get to see -- Rome, Paris, Rio. Hawaii, where the hula skirted women swayed as orbit of sweat and strands of grass in hypnotics as if their shiny-silky haired lives depended on the inner pull of that pendulum. How even Topeka sounded something with the brush of a smudged-marker fingertip fresh from playground dirt and sometimes lacquered in pale pink, the only polish mom would let us, if we were good.

We were never quite good, but she always yielded, she always gave in. Two cool strokes per tiny nail she brushed over us, our heads in the damp earth of her lap, musk and honey and menses and Midnight in Paris perfume cradled there. How full the brush of her breasts, the silky fresh cotton of her blouse brushing across our cheeks, the undercarriage of those globes a comfort-warm brush across the forehead, a fat rush of teardrop, a umbrella of inclusiveness as she pressed a quick kiss first to the cheek of our every-one baby. Meggie, insistently hopping one long leg to another thought always chosen at the beginning constant was her fear she'd never be, then me, then finally our elder sister Liz -- she ever-presented eyes on us our second mother our tattle-taler our consoler. Then after she'd bored of such sentry duty or just because, satisfied, she'd had her turn at Mom's favor, off she'd abandon us to the playroom for rag doll or record player. Meggie and I, we never tired of lounging in that warm pocket of protection, soft skin's secrets hidden there in the pouch from which we'd so earlier sprung, a bloody fuzz of yowling baby face in babyfat folds she loved that would take us years to find someone to love so nearly so.

God, baby, your tits, your tits, he exhales hunger onto my belly, I've never seen them like this. I've never, insensate he is already lost. His palm grazes the undercarriage where a blush of sweat lingers that the overhead fan has neither dried nor offers to lift away and away as the ebony and cricket chirrup through window screens threatens to catch like tinder a panting hotter and higher and higher as his mouth takes possession of first one then another anther-bud. It's not Kev's bottom lip, nor his tongue, nor the bruise of a bite he leaves, a love nip he leaves sloppy half-on, half-off the rubbery flex and pull of aureole. I cry out for the tender has drawn a single scar a droplet of blood and pulse and ache not unlike that first night lain dry where scratch and scrape of synthetic seat covers against bare buttocks left me swallowing a sob. Again he mistakes this gasp at the base of my exposed throat, this calling as if from the throws of a milk glass well, for good, for more, for deeper and deeper. But I am already lost to the fullness of this one word of which I am already drunken with fullness, baby, my baby, his baby, our baby, earth father, primal mother.

Here there is no work week, there is no Wednesday, there are no fights over who left the milk to sour and who left stains spilling sticky onto countertops without wiping them up, no Liz's father, no donor, no Meggie's father, no hesitancy. Here there is only a sickle moon playing soft strokes, splash across shoulders and curve, here there is me, here there is Kev, there are my thighs gripping Kev's thighs, there are Kev's hands caressing my cheeks and my neck, there are my hands dipping into the bowl, gripping his buttock to take him closer.

Baby, baby, baaaay, he is thrust and parry, he is stab stab stab and I too am pulled under in the heady promise of each tiny fist, of each toe I will tickle and trace against my torso as I suckle him to me, to the milky breast which, rising for drudge and dredge of work the next morning, relieving myself in the porcelain bowl. A shiver, a streak that is movement and masque, I hover to inspect -- a marvel. I palm first right then left, finding the overflow, the torpor, the tenderness. Tracing with fingertip the wound he has woven with a tooth's scrape and suction's fissure, the ruddy sepia saturating the bud. What once was anemic pink tips jelly as a rat's belly, now blushed, suffused with a hue my body has never tasted. How rational as breath I exhaled, I watched these bare lips in the steam-fogged glass, my lips a mother's lips lipstick-worn, as warm-tongued as a kitten I lift flesh, tongue taking love's salt and spritzed dimestore perfume, lapping one then the other clean for the baby, my baby, his baby, our baby come.

Then slack, his weight upon me. god, baby, baby, baby, the stubble of his cheek panting against the skin, burrowing further and further until it reaches that pocket of damp earth, musk and honey from which his honey so soon flowed. I fold and unfold against him, against the mattress, the spinning kind the pendulum winding, winding but never quite enough, the whisper kick taken up residence, this baby, his baby, my baby come. I contract, I contract and Kev believes what he believes, rolling over, already lost to satiety, to sleep.

Through cotton curtain lace, pale relics of our once-upon-a-time nursery, castoffs from Mom that we have taken as we her children always take for our own, a voice baby, baby without a voice comes as a heat that is not breeze as a breeze that is not borne in the dark. My one hand lies feathering Kev's curls, breath steadied, bottom lip parted he is nothing now if not a baby in repose, baby, baby, I love Kev, I do, I hate Kev, I do, always this through six interminable years. No matter, my other resigns itself to that flat map which is that globe spinning sparks across landscape if only my own familiar dells and hills. To that which when parted is slick with kev is slick with me is slippery with Kev and me and me and baby, our baby, oh baby. I shudder, I shudder, I shatter.

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