Skinny as a pencil

I need to get back to reading more intensely because it's only through reading that writing flies.

An article in a magazine on the plane about memoir and sex led to an afternoon in a hot apartment in Nashville, being pushed back onto the closet floor, the hems of my dresses brushing his head, my face. A bed is a boat, and we drifted. Another bed, white, in a bungalow on a Caribbean island, and when I opened my eyes, butterflies were a reproach to when I had closed them, angry. Asian whores on your day off. A drive-in movie theater in upstate New York showing a porn film, moans blasting out of speakers twisted. Mosquitoes ate us alive, laughing until we finally rolled up the window. We rolled up the windows, slapped the sluggish, blood splat on my thigh, your shin, screams (the ecstasy) muffled. At one point there were only windows to remember, the one at the end of a black leather couch where I knelt, naked: branches stripped bare under a lead sky tracing the panes. Oh, I forgot. Much earlier, a hotel room, and you, skinny as a pencil -- every part -- quick!  planes taking off, a piano, a telephone out of reach, a pulsating flag, stoned.

Enough, for now.