What Is Called Fucking, Writing Could Be, But Not Vice Versa

What is called fucking, writing could be . . .

There are places to walk in New Orleans where you never have to touch the ground.
They were named by a friend of mine the Avenues of the Dead,
there is also one in New York City called Avenue of the Americas.
Even so, neither is the equal of Reforma or Insurgentes in Mexico City,
whose tall warrior and angel make these the only streets you can pray to and walk off
alive to have café in a cantina patronized as well as worked by the young
whores who travel all the way down from Mexicali and up from some town in Chiapas
or anywhere else that has no tourist trade and therefore little need
to buy a young girl with no love of anyone but a yen for money, as little as there is . . .
There is no place to walk in Mexicali or any town in Chiapas . . .

This friend in New Orleans was a woman who did not love men,
but she did like writers who knew how to fuck as well as they knew how to kiss.
Women, that is. Women showed her how. That was after she broke a man’s jaw
because he was praising her tits, he called them, as she walked by, and his companions
grew suddenly quiet. After that came the rainstorm the night she was raped
by a blonde-haired Cuban woman whose name shall never be mentioned here
or anywhere. You can talk about my friend’s doctor, who told her secrets
she said only dead dykes knew, and that word was like niggers in Havana
or Oakland, a word okay to know but to use only if you were someone
for whom writing this is going too far, so I take it back, set it on fire, watch it burn . . .

Penny told me everything. She was strong like a man, her lover said.
Penny told me how they saw one another exclusively, her friends always dressed
like men if that was okay with her and others like her, who wanted to be women
in the same room. Penny went to bed with me when we met and we did nothing but sleep.
I will never forget reading from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and climbing on her
to see how long I could stay hard between the thighs she opened very cautiously,
and that was Seattle where rain was drizzle more than storm. I got up and finished
alone in the bathroom, where Jacqui loved to fellate me, she called it, when she drove up
from Portland for a weekend, but those days were my own, not like other nights
I asked Cathleen to do the same. But I should stop talking about what actually happened

and return to fiction. There are too many risks when you talk about real people,
they come back to haunt you if they’re already dead, or if they are still living
they let someone else do the talking, even if it is another side of their lives,
the one you had the indiscretion to mention and might as well buy love
and talk all you want, endlessly if need be, forever if there is a price
on eternity. Fiction is easier to imagine. You have your own life
to relive and if you couldn’t spell or read your own writing
you would be fucked, but not by the comely companion
of your dreams. Besides, there’s more than fucking
to render, a word a teacher said instead of write.

. . . yet words are too lonely to love very long.

(10 March 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander