After having his cock in my mouth two-times-over the night before, I went to the P.O. to pick up what turned out to be the present I’d sent him for his birthday. It had been sent back to me labeled: Dead Mail Matter. Walked out of the P.O. into the snow thinking how he felt inside me -- when it went on and on and he didn’t come but I did over and over.

Breakfast at Veselka’s: I ate everything on my plate quickly without feeling I was eating at all, my real body somewhere else. And the sun blasted through the window behind him so that I couldn’t really see his face -- the details of his face elsewhere with my body -- my mouth. Eating then seemed not as real as it had been in my dream the night before. Although in the dream I only looked at food I saw spread out on rows and rows of tables. But somehow looking became eating.

Stood up in the ancient four legged tub, water falling from me, took the large pink towel from his hand and quickly dried myself as he stood beside the tub, eye fastened on the telly. Then he raised his hand and placed it in space -- settling as if on an imaginary armrest in the manner of an Elizabethan gentleman. I glanced at the hand baffled somehow, searching briefly for meaning then climbed out of the tub without assistance, on my own power.

“Since it is more difficult to think in terms of simultaneity than in terms of sequence, we begin to conceptualize the movement in terms of adirectional trajectory.” Jessica Benjamin from The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination

Everyone suddenly blue, a dark effervescent blue as if covered with body paint -- dressed for carnival. But somehow it was caused by a shift in the lighting -- suddenly everyone resembled barking blue dogs. We began describing ourselves to each other. He said I was all blue except for a spot of red at the center of my lips -- a deep red spot as deep as the blue that covered the rest of my body.

I felt cold. His hands touched me, his body pressed against me and I felt a vague sensation of pressure at different points on my body as if I were being caressed through layers and layers of wool. He was a slight breeze sending faint ripples across the surface of a lake. I could hear him breathing.

It was a green-sunny Spring day. We stood on the sidewalk. I began to gag. Red, black blood spewed from my mouth onto the asphalt. I crouched as he knelt beside me trying to stop the bleeding by pressing his shirttails over my mouth.

Perhaps this is preparation -- this slipping in and out of madness?

The day is cold and beautiful. Snow falls on Brooklyn. Though I hated the sight of the first flakes, now I’m glad.

“They do not appear, as a rule, to be integral components of our conscious psychic life, but seem rather to be extraneous, apparently accidental occurrences.” Jung

He said his fantasies are usually more abstract. He hardly ever focused on a specific person or as in this case on merely the hands of a specific person.

I see rocks, twigs, old bricks, dry weeds. All moving below me. No, I must be moving. In a moving vehicle. Perhaps a train. Looking out of a window to the ground below.

I was hungry. So I decided to clean out the refrigerator. Ran into the living room and turned up the TV so I could hear it in the kitchen as I cleaned. Left the glass top of the vegetable “crisper” in the sink with the water running.

I got back and started scrubbing the top of the crisper. I was thinking, he said the night before that he was leaving soon for Hanoi, then the glass shattered. The floor, the countertop, the sink-full of shards of glass.

“You’re so beautiful” he said. He was stroking my back, the long slope of my back. Somewhere there was a tape recorder playing. I heard the sound of my own voice reading a text I’d written. When my voice stopped, his continued. I was in a bright pink motel.

what is a true thing
how true can a thing be
one thing -- how can it be true
when all else is added
is it more true
more truth
the statement and
its antithesis

We were lying in bed pulling the dark brown comforter around us. There was a knocking sound. But no one was at the door. We tried to sleep and speak quietly of those things you only speak of in bed -- but the knocking, banging sound kept distracting us -- as if someone were trying desperately to get in or out.

She kept dropping things, her appointment book, her script, a peach, and fidgeting, finding new things to eat. Her dark tan standing out against white shorts and T-shirt, rustling papers and paying little attention to the progress of the class. Later while she was on stage working on a monologue from Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander she explained that she was always amazed by and at the same time afraid of the wonderful lush world that seemed to open up in her mind while on stage -- as if she wasn’t good enough -- couldn’t be worthy of such imaginative splendor. So on stage she kept moving and breaking her concentration and off stage she dropped things.

I sat by the window of my favorite cafe watching a woman seated at one of the tables outside. Adoring the way she slouched and the mixture of sadness and boredom in her eyes, I pointed her out to the gentleman sitting across from me. He said, “A fine example of Yuppie discontent. I wouldn’t want to be her boyfriend.” I ignored his comment except to wonder why he couldn’t see the beauty I saw: her reddish hair, blunt cut, dressed all in gray, a single empty glass on the table in front of her. I loved the way she gazed into the distance as a way of saying: “There is no salvation anywhere but why should I give up searching?”

She had burning red hair and her nearly translucent skin stretched tightly about the bone-pale blue eyes staring from the skull -- a ghost kept in motion by desire. She was in love with an Irish folk singer she’d never met.

He said, “that train was slow as shit!” and I wondered about the truth of that expression. After all doesn’t it all depend on the efficiency of your digestive system?

Reminds me of this woman who really took the expression “You are what you eat” to extremes. She claimed that you are what you expel. In other words: you are your shit -- she even wrote a play about it. The main character was a Ladies Room attendant in a sleazy downtown dance club who also had an extreme and extensive scatological philosophy. This was the woman one ex-love-of-my-life took up with after we broke up. Amazing.

As his girlfriend tried to be friendly and asked me to hire her, I stood shifting my weight from one foot to the other, occasionally looking into her eyes trying to determine whether she had anything particularly beautiful about her. She mentioned she was performing soon at the Lizard’s Tail in Williamsburg and I thought of the night her boyfriend thrust his fingers up my cunt and the sound of his breathing as he stroked his cock and I held his balls as he came.

I remember yelling and screaming -- holding onto an open car door as it pulled away dragging me through the street.

©2002, Wanda Phipps

Back to first page > Wanda’s account of Speech Acts > page 1, 2

Wanda read “Rose Window, or Prosettes” at Speech Acts, accompanied by Joel Schlemowitz’s film work & Marc Sloan’s soundscape. She’d like to thank the producers and editors of the recordings and publications in which some of these poems first appeared:

Agni Journal #39, The Unbearables Anthology, The World #43, Handymag and Sperm Motility Control of the Human Testicular Response by Best of Word Is The Bird on WFMU..., and the audio cassette magazine A Sheep on the Bus #1.