Island time / Machine Overstimulation

They’re supposed to look like a ghost with a log, or… a small friend and also a gift. It’s my feet under a chunky, nodule quilt. There’re a set of sliding doors in our rental unit, one side with a screen and the other without and a wall ten feet off which drops off straight to the ocean floor. I knew you hadn’t been watching but listening from the kitchenette around the corner, nodding not in line but on time, percussively, which was a comforting idiosyncrasy I hadn’t ever mentioned in hopes I could say it at your funeral, maybe, or whenever you may be close to dying. One ear’s on the ocean. I’m wiggling around a bit, letting the quilt fall off one hip to sink a reel, you turn to the sliding doors. Why are we inside? We’d come in not twenty minutes ago, washing our feet with the hose outside to eat grits from the paper casing on the cool kitchen floor. The sun’s out, you’re saying, we’re wasting time and money. Had I not washed out my line twice today — That is not very island time of you — I’d have a few words to say, but I’m tired and covered in grippy, fluid filled skin that squeaks in sunlight. It’s nice to lie down awhile, sometimes. I listen for lulls in the break, to hear you throwing coconuts around or pissing in the ocean. I splay my legs left and right, curling around the edge of the bed with my eyes facing the open doors ahead, I shimmy off the swim bottoms, I’m naked toward the ocean. I let my hands rest, and create the pressure mentally with each crash of water, pressing into me, I wiggle to the bottom of the bed so my rear hangs loosely and I let the sound of the ocean fuck me harder, slower, far through intention, it’s like one of those machines that picks your nose and pulls your hair  and fucks your ass and squeezes your tits all in one instant, one of those machines that exist in the absolute, machine overstimulation. You won’t fuck me, so she will. You won’t fuck me, she wants to.  You won’t fuck me, nobody ever will. You stand past your hips with no effort by bobbing, taking each wave to the face you’d move against the current I create with my hips splayed till you drown and I wish you’d quit holding your breath to keep from falling in line with my own.

Art;

Split 2, Amy Sillman 2020

Acrylic and oil on linen

72 x 60 1/2 inches

https://www.gladstonegallery.com/artist/amy-sillman/work-detail/7844/i-split-2-i