He reaches to pull up my skirt, I am breath to landscape, his finger reaching for my clit. This rain of pussy this rain of cum through skirt to rocks I feel his Latin rhythm enter his hips and I respond as I’m led to his fist. His left hand has found my breasts, tightened my nipples to points. I must feel the rhythm of his lips, for his native tongue that’s speaking down my spine, down the cloudless sky of crystal blue to violet pink to welcome a deeper force of twilight deep purple. Like a burning emotion of want and wait, his right hand feels mi corazón and the air is a guitar of deep sighing. We must be screaming into the skies—I don’t even know the song we could become—it hasn’t been written, but is felt in our eternal human existence. His left hand moves to his side as warrior. We are in offering. We are offering ourselves, our sexuality, our cultural pride, our ancestral complexities, our desire/ deseo to madre earth/ to Mija sky/ to Mijo stars/ to padre moon/ and to the blessed mountains of blood-orange-dipped twilight.
Upon this moment and breath, I am panting as though there is a rigorous, intoxicating climb inside. We are climbing. He is pulling off my shirt and turning us, as in salsa, grasping my right hand and gripping me harder. Jesús kissing and licking my back, as I turn, licking down his brown muscular arms. He moves to my back, to my ass, and toward my shoulders before instinctively, we are in eye contact again. He is now drawn to me: Goddess, La Femme Latina, ultimate Vírgen/Whore, am I. Jesús, él estes mi Dios, the lost warrior, the last Gypsy, and the unstoppable Blackjack King. We worship each touch, submitting to taste of what mortal lips can offer. For I am beyond the poetess, the high-ranking Courtesan, the Puta men wish to save, the Latin Amazon from the East/ West/ North/ South. Nosotros, we, are prayer. And I am now the next mystery, la Vírgin he invoked to absolve and purify his body and replenish his soul anew. Mi alma, enhanced and washed, my body appeased, massaged and sore. I am at one with him and this panorama. No longer is my heart aching. Nosotros/we, enraptured and enwrapped as dos amantes morenos, entwined like ancient Mexicano constellations, shining beautifully, below the Southwestern sapphire skies and upon the rocky brown desert landscape, tanned reddened glorious shifted, until the next time.
Carving a Woman
Jewel Blackfeather Welter
Have you ever thought about how you would describe tasting salt for the first time to someone who never had the opportunity to scrape salt crystals away from a piece of pizza and feel the granules almost burning the tongue with a flavor that is neither sweet nor sour? What about a way to explain why the moon in full face drives some people to spin beneath the milky light and wish on stars and newborn babies, torn comic book covers and broken glass, metal soda can tabs and glittering Mardi Gras beads? Trying to express these things is like translating the language of the heart, which speaks in sparrow-pecks and wild canary trills; like detailing how the human form became a marvel that walks on two legs after years of evolution.
The only way you can even think to touch the feeling behind the words is to call it magic. People say magic is dead, but they lie. They are jaded with the milk of death in their eyes while they dream awake. Go ahead and laugh if you must when I speak of magic. That is what my roommate Lalita did the day we walked into a room as friends unacquainted with the love of our gender and exited with girl-juice on our lips and the sweat of pomegranates and tangerines along the creases of our thighs. She laughed at me constantly, but her laughter was not the laughter born of scorn and derision.
Lalita’s laughter was like coyotes dancing in the desert and she wore the scent of sun-dried wood on her skin from her main job of making cabinets. On weekends, she carved animals out of logs for spare cash. Many nights, she walked deeply into the woods near our house and cut faces into tree bark so that anyone else who wandered through the woods saw that the trees, like rocks, had faces. She loved drawing the human eye to the personality of each tree. During the week and on the weekends, the rich odor of wood surrounded Lalita, an odor so real inhaling it was like walking barefoot in the grass at midnight.
I liked waiting until she returned from work, just to be near the wood smell. She came home in her faded jeans and cotton apron, her hair pinned on her head in long coils that reminded me of crow nests. Straddling a kitchen chair, Lalita took the pins from the back of her head and slowly shook the black strands forward. Shavings fell from Lalita’s hair. After she unlaced her utility boots, her feet pressed the curls of pine, oak, and cedar into the carpet. Chuckling, she told me the lewd jokes the men at her workstation told her, about the teenage boys in a convertible she flashed at a stoplight when they gawked at her, and the painted Sioux ponies she saw behind barbed-wire fences on her way home. I tried to concentrate on Lalita’s words, but all I could see were her long, lean legs wrapped around the legs of the chair and the white curve of her incisors against her lower lip when she smiled.
She was sex-voodoo, that woman with Taxco silver on her wrists and my heart in her palm. At the time, I did not think Lalita was aware of my affections. Now, after having impaled her with my tongue and been impaled by her tongue and teeth, I know she understood all along, maybe had planned the seduction from the first time we spoke. I did not know. My eyes were half-closed to what was alchemy: her. She opened my eyes with her tongue and laughter, with the inclination of her head to kiss my throat and her fingers bowed around my hips as she held me like a piece of wood she planned to carve. And carve me she did, casting a spell of fingernails and cunt-muscles and the fragrance of her that was like the inside of a sacred forest, untouched by human hands.
The day we shared a tryst that led to our eventual relationship was the same as any other day, except for the magic that drifted through the air, on Lalita, and in me—a magic I did not acknowledge until she smiled as fiercely as I ever saw her smile and told me I was her heart. “You’re my heart, Shawnee Blue,” she sang, thumping her fingertips against her breastbone, “my heart, heart, heart. A sleepyhead, but still my heart.” Although I had an Indian name, Lalita was the true Indian: strong hips and the kind of high, sloping cheekbones that seemed formed from desert rock. Her eyes saw far into the future and her hands knew how to shuffle the Mexican tarot cards that were a staple in her heritage. She was half Indian, half Mexican, and all woman.
My response was to throw a pillow at Lalita and burrow deeper beneath the blankets. The warm cocoon smelled of cedar chips and wildflowers with a hint of Lalita’s musk and cinnamon spice. She dodged the pillow, flashing her teeth at me like a she-wolf searching for a mate. I nursed a terrible hangover from a night of drinking tequila and Salsa dancing. Lalita had held my hair back from my face while I vomited the contents of my stomach into a toilet and then, a trash can. She slept in the bed with me, bent around my drunken form, her warmth so good and real, so close and true.
“You shouldn’t have drunk so much last night, Shawnee,” she stated seriously. Lalita stroked baby tendrils of light hair away from my face. I leaned into her touch because she radiated intensity and summer sweat born from the work she did honestly with her hands. Her wicked nature belied the strange tenderness she showed for me, as if she were protecting me and I was a member of her wolf pack that she needed to keep safe. Sometimes, I fantasized about being a wolf cub that needed to crawl up onto her body and nurse milk from her teats. Other times, I envisioned us as lionesses, tonguing impurities from each other’s bodies. Most of the time, I watched Lalita, my fingers itching to trace her skin and hair. Something inside of me burned and trembled for her.
“Call it a forgetting,” I mumbled. “Instead of a haunting, it was a forgetting. I needed to forget.”
“Yeah,” she breathed. Her dark eyes seemed darker, more liquid in the slanting morning light that played across her features. Ordinarily, Lalita’s irises were a deep brown that turned to amber when certain types of light played over her face—like the fluid, burnished gold of an autumnal afternoon. “We all need to forget sometimes. You, more than most.” She adjusted the pillows on the bed and settled onto the floor, cross-l
egged and straight spined, looking like an Aztec princess.
“Yeah,” I agreed. I was a young thing, but I had seen enough betrayal to sharpen my perspective and turn my blue eyes gray. “I don’t understand it all, Lala. I gave him everything and still, it wasn’t enough for him. I don’t know how many times I can keep rebuilding myself and rising from the ashes someone has left of my life before I just…” Unable to continue, I paused and rubbed at my eyes.
“But you rise. Your instinct knows more than your heart.” Her eyes lingered on my small hands, inches from hers on the edge of the bed. “Your hands were born to fight.” She patted my hand, and a wild animal stirred in my heart. When she drew her hand away from mine, I was more than a little regretful, but I pretended not to care.
“I don’t have hands like yours, Lalita. Your hands do things. You create with your hands.” As I spoke to her, I looked at the folding of her fingers on the white sheet, her skin like new sage leaves and dark as a farmer’s egg. My lips lowered to press a kiss to the knob of a knuckle before I could stop myself.
“Your hands can do things, too, Shawnee,” she laughed, raspy and low.
“You could carve a woman with those hands, could cut tracks into flesh with your fingernails.” Her full little mouth was so close—too close—and rather than resist the gravitational force that emanated from somewhere at Lalita’s core, I kissed her soundly on the mouth, just a touch of lip to lip, a slight grazing of teeth.
“I want to hew you the way you carve your wood,” I whispered. “I want to carve you with my hands.” Silence lingered between us, heated by the breath escaping our lips, tickling our throats, and flaring our nostrils. I was almost afraid I had made a serious mistake until she let out a small snarl and curled her fingertips across my jaw line, forcing my gaze to meet hers.
“Then, you should,” Lalita purred. It was a delicious torture to have her finally in my grasp and to be uncertain of how to first stroke her. I had never made love to a woman before Lalita. Now that I’ve seduced and been seduced by her hundreds of times, my fingers deep in Lalita’s cunt and tongue twisting with hers, I cannot imagine being penetrated or captured by anyone but Lalita. She said I was her heart, but she is my life.
So, on that morning, I looked at Lalita’s pink, flushed cheeks and felt desire rising from the tips of my toes to my hips. Instead of asking why or how, I let my eyelids fall shut and learned about loving Lalita with my bare hands. My palms trembled along the flat of her chin, the proud line of her shoulders, and the curve of her belly that was girl-soft and woman-firm to the touch. She did not melt into my caresses, and met my fingers with lips, thighs, and the hardened pebble of a nipple that ached and arched against my fingertips. I rolled the second nipple with my other hand and listened to her pant when I tightened my hold on her.
“I want to see you, really see you,” I whispered, biting her earlobe and snapping at her lower lip. I drew her cotton T-shirt up higher until I exposed her large, dark areolas and swollen nipples. Since Lalita had been sleeping, she wore no bra to fetter the fullness of her breasts or provide a barrier to my curious hands.
Her restless spirit did not quiet itself as she pulled and clawed at the sheets covering me and then removed me from the battered sweatshirt and bikini panties I sported. Cool air swirled across my torso. I huddled under the quilt Lalita’s abuela knitted for me the Christmas before. Lalita’s eyes dissected me. She told me that she wanted to fuck me in full sunlight and eat fruit from the dip of my navel and the hollow of my sex. Then, she said I was magic and yanked me from beneath the blankets and onto the sun-dappled living room floor. Patches of the wooden floor were worn from the pressure of our heels when we taught each other how to Salsa and hopped from one foot to the next after biting fresh habañero peppers from the garden behind the house.
I was tempted to tug her into the backyard and roll around the endless vines of the tomato plants, thrust my thumb into Lalita’s pussy amidst the orange sorbet–colored blooms sprouting from the squash, and sink my teeth into the ripe tissue of a peach toasted by Lalita’s hands. There was a world of possibility that unfolded when we fell upon the floor and on each other, tongues flickering serpent-like in the half-light of an afternoon just beginning. When I fluttered my forefinger along the slight decline of her clavicles and felt the ridges of her ribs floating just beneath the milky caramel of her abdomen, I wanted to plunge deeper into her, wanted to see if she tasted like cardamom and honey, like prickly pear cactus fruit and deep August monsoon rainfall.
I cooed as she straddled my face and let me produce the hungry slurping sounds that I needed to emit against her, my Spanish lover. Lalita rode my stabbing tongue and showed me that her taste was deeper, more primeval than anything I’d imagined. She was an ancient earth goddess reincarnated in a mortal’s succulent body. Raven-black hair curled to protect the tender lips that my teeth liked gnawing at, just because it caused her to shiver, stretch the delicate musculature at the small of her back, and spread her thighs. Intoxicated, I stared at Lalita, waxing and waning for her luscious body, sweat-slicked vulva, and the exquisite little growling sounds she made low in her throat the quicker I washed my tongue across her clitoris. I could tell by the way she tilted her pelvis that she wanted me to dig my fingers into her folds and immerse myself in her clear to the knuckles. I did not give Lalita what she needed, not just yet. We had years for the culmination of our lust and only that one moment to savor and remember the tracks in the snow and across sand that led us to discover each other this way.
Desire radiated from Lalita and I wanted to love her, fuck her, and violate her, just to let her know how long she’d been beneath my skin and sinking into the marrow of my bones, a magic only explained by carving a woman from passion and perspiration, oxygen and heartwood that looked like heaven and the soul of love on Lalita’s tongue when she murmured that she loved me. Rather than do any of those things, I held her in my arms, pinned her like a butterfly, and watched her gaze intensify when I uttered her name and knew that I’d be saying her name for many years, just as I suckled at her tits and lapped moisture from the sweet sex that was never more beautiful than it was magic.
Class Struggle
María Helena Dolan
Ah, such a lovely evening. The sky is that spectacular autumnal azure, with the sun just starting to ribbon across in long twilight gold and rust and purple rays. Ain’t Nature grand? Me, I’m sitting on the raised dais of the Front Desk, face phosphorescently aglow from the triple bank of monitors, wearing a .38 and a natty blue uniform, complete with military-style tie and cop-style hat.
Oh yeah, lest we forget the personal touch: my first initial and last name are stitched in discreetly contrasting thread over my left breast. Here I am: the few, the proud, the underpaid.
It’s a full employment economy, doncha know? That means full scut work too, for liberal arts graduates with no particular skills and no particular connections and no particular wish to be hassled about being too goddam butch.
So I’m “guarding” a high-tech facility with lots of big-time hush-hush genetic researchers. (I guess on some jobs, you want a weight-lifting, tough-assed Latina dyke—so maybe thievin’ competitors think twice about rushing a place guarded by a gun-totin’ marimacha who tops out at 5’10” and 220, with formidable shoulders and killer thighs.)
Hey, it’s a living—barely. I’ve worked off the books for a long time, though, and I’m trying to get some legal time in.
So, I’m here as a Guardling to watch monitors, sign people in and out, make two rounds a night to ensure nothing’s been forced or blown up, handle any petty bullshit that comes up. And Guardlings are not permitted to read, watch TV or make personal phone calls. Oh the distraction! Oh the humanity!
Not that most of these pinchones think of us as human. Basically, they don’t think about us, period. We’re the brown faces in blue uniforms sitting at the front as they plod or trod in. We’re “Security” after all; they’re scientists, doctors, Big
Shots with tons of research money and Names to make.
So why would they know ours? A few of the “staffers” do; the ones who’re smart enough to realize that they’re really only one rung above us, so they know better than to give attitude.
Those are the ones who aren’t blind to that fact that if their key cards malfunction or the toilets don’t flush automatically or a gadget goes missing, they dial one set of four digits.
And the Voice on the other end answers, “Front Desk.” We’re troubleshooters as well as keeping the bad guys away from the lab rats—that’s what everybody in Security calls these gen-mod geniuses. (And Front Desk can either come through promptly on a call, or take fuck-all sweet time; how do you think that determination gets made? Mr. Asshole So Big I Can’t Even See You or Miss Is Your Mother’s Cold Any Better? Gosh, wonder which gets a better response time?)
Now, I could obsess about the cultural and class unfairness of how I came to be here on this dais. But, I actually sort of like it. There’s a kind of power in sitting here raised slightly above the crowd, with my gun.
In fact, we could have bigger caliber semi-autos; the company even supplies them if we want. But I like the feel of this baby in my palm, and I like the way she lays just right on my side. So as long as they furnish the hollow point, I’ll keep my first love with me, thank you very much.
It’s not as if I ever have call to pull her. No no. We don’t even get borrachónes or homeless from the street. The lines of this place are way too severe, and it fends them off in a sterile feng shui sort of way.
Given the lack of stimulation, there are blocks of time I have to fill. For amusement between the rounds, I give myself little exercises. Yeah, I have hand grips and leg weights. But I have to be sort of discreet, keeping that shit under the desk for later. So instead, I have to do more subtle things to keep from going shit-screaming stir-crazy, or totally postal.
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