Dear Sing,

So here I am, working on my ending, going crazy with endings bye-bye book, so-long lover Dodie's handing me one eviction notice after another, my lease on her body she says is OVER this letter is "the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,/ Cramped on nothing." I try not to be pessimistic as Plath but, Sing … we were at my kitchen table eating ratatouille when suddenly I was on my knees, tugging down his pants licking the crack of his ass—at The End of that crack is a dank smelly hole, that's where Dodie plans to stick me—can you see why this letter's taken months to wrestle to a finish, I'm like the anarchist in Five Came Back, being flown home at gunpoint to my execution—when the plane crashes in the rain forest near a tribe of natives who decapitate their victims, fill the heads with hot sand and shrink them, I'm happy. A few of his cells stick to my tongue like specimens, instead of sending them to a pathologist, I swallow. I've been fucking my brains out my brains are all fucked out you know how it goes, Sing, your writing goes down the tubes like an unfertilized ovum blood on his cock blood on my thighs blood on the towel beneath my bun I am a feminist artist I buy lipstick wholesale in five-gallon buckets and cast it into urinals the color of menses, urinals that glisten and gape. You are my opposite number—wired on espresso vibrating in a chair an artist and a feminist sticking close to those cigarettes living alone is scarier than a movie— the last time I lived by myself was in 1977—the street hustlers next door boomed the lightwell with Donna Summer, they never seemed to sleep these gaunt boys hanging out the front windows luscious as orchids, "Hi, hon, wanna party?" Whenever I switched off the kitchen light cockroaches rustled the garbage, trapped, frantic, huge, like the anxiety attack clawing my chest Love to Love You Baby I'd come home feed the cat and dart out the door. The rare times I did sleep there, or sit down, the cat glued herself to my lap and wailed—so I flew her to Nebraska for a couple of months to cool out with Nature. Her name was Molly, a beautiful calico. The night of my wedding she wouldn't eat, then after fifteen years died of kidney failure nice timing, Molly unmoving in her tiny cage she felt hollow against my palm, not a purr, a plastic tube sticking out of a shaved spot on her front paw, fluid dripped through it chlorophyll-green as if the vet were transfusing her backwards from animal to plant then the tube turns umber mineral then empty air.

Fingers undulate over belly shoulder ass, fingers parting thighs, "You're a kite," he says softly, "and I'm a key attached to you—electricity is inevitable, it's in the air." I want the warm hand the warm hand doesn't call me by name. "Kite and Key," he muses, "I like the initials: KK, like me. And for you I would say, 'You're the Dog and I'm the Bone.'" "DB is for Dodie—what about Mina?" I'm the Doppelganger and she's just a Body chin stubble scratches my cheek, "How about 'You're the Mouse and I'm the Hole'—or 'You're the Mustard and I'm the Hot dog.'" The warm hand shimmies across my cunt, pauses to sniff then burrows. "You're a Mountain and I'm a Hiker you're a Mouth and I'm Homeless you're Miserable and I'm Happy you're a Million and I'm a Hundred you're Magic and I'm History." The warm hand twitches you're the Minutes and I'm an Hour you are the Map and I am the Highway you're the Mud and I'm the Hut #133

...

Even though I promised KK I wouldn't, I send Quincey a letter, a card really, of a small featureless figure in a bed with a hot water bottle on his head, to the left of the bed pounces a cross-eyed Godzilla, a cross-eyed alligator peeks out from underneath, a pink and green cross-eyed bird monster lounges to the right Heard you were feeling rather beastly open it up: Get Well Quick then:

Dear Quincey—

I bought this card for Sam D'Allesandro when they were still saying he had "the flu." Then I found out he had AIDS and never sent it. Last night I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour on Bravo—I couldn't help but think of you. The woman in the movie's schlocky obsessive longing—her tragic sighs before the inevitable forgetting of her German soldier lover—I think the tragedy lies in the fact that the forgetting is only conscious— something remains, in the cells, in the nerves, that keeps you climbing the walls with impossibility. I think you know what I'm talking about.

—Mina

The devil appeared to Dodie on a fireball demanding, "Kill Mina!" I told her to stop listening to heavy metal.

Two thirty a.m., I've been trying to get to sleep for three hours, abandon KK to the damp cotton sheets, lie on the couch, bored, restless, my mind jittery with static, might as well masturbate—I'm too lazy to use my fingers, what's in the living room that I can hump my desire against—the remote control, a curvaceous stretch of plastic marketed as "ergonomic" POWER EJECT REWIND RECALL I wrap it in the hem of my nightgown, lie on my stomach and wedge it against my clit—now for some scenery MEMORY CLEAR RESET Quincey said hello to me at the Susan Howe reception—we meet in the bathroom, I pull down my pantyhose and lean over the claw-footed tub scouring powder's gritty perfume Quincey drops his jeans and fucks me from behind I lunge against the cold rim, belly startled his hands are tied—with what?—my pantyhose, he'd like that, he always liked it when I "made" him fuck me, I reach back and pinch him until he bruises the cheeks of my ass are two semis he's hitched between "harder, harder," umpf umpf Umpf, a bar of soap tumbles out of the metal dish looped over the edge, we look just like the living chugalug chugalug avidly claiming our gobbets of skin and entrails his beard corroding the back of my neck is this physically possible? Where are my knees? Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own I press a palm against the bottom of the tub to keep us from toppling over, to keep my head from banging the wall blood from my temple inching in rivulets down the curved porcelain STANDBY TRACKING POWER MEMORY my hips thrust with his thrusts, the remote clicks from channel to channel frantically and irrationally as a decapitated chicken—Quincey's wife, Lucy, zips her buttery suede jacket and sighs, "I feel this terrible headache coming on," Susan Howe discusses Melville with a long-haired woman Bar-tle-by Bar-tle-by Bar-tle-by friction sparks my clit "harder, harder" bars of moonlight steal past the windowshade and spill on the floor, high above in the inky night Dion watches, his face grinning, green cheese the grounds sink to the bottom, somehow shocked.

...