yeama h. bangura

This is dedicated to every woman who has ever wanted to kill her lover; and my lover.

It’s been a week since we last spoke. Seven days since I’ve heard your vocal chords whine, those thin and tender little pieces of muscle straining to make out my name. I wish you could know how unremorseful I am; that the intensive isolation that's taken your place is preferable. I touch myself now and think of nothing. It’s bliss.

Last week you were overwhelmed with pleasure, unable to get past the first syllable of my name, choking on moans mixed with my spit. I looked down at you, you up at me. I joyously pumped my hips and held my breast, performing as your Jezebel once more. I closed my eyes, threw my head back gasping and after a moment I realized that in addition to seeing nothing- I felt nothing. I felt the pressure of you inside me, the weight of your hands guiding my hips, the sensation of your eyes on me, yet I realized I felt nothing. Our fucking sessions were objective- not the objectification born from womanhood but from the sickness of your sex I let host within me. Our arrangement was no longer desirable. What I really wanted from you my dear, was to make me feel something, something good. After engaging in weekly leechings, you left me emptier and emptier and still I looked for the cure in you. And while you never led me to believe you were the answer, you still had to pay for the shortcoming.

Admittedly, we buttered the clock. Slick hands glided past the one, then the two, how easily three months became a year. As the weeks blended together and our hard boundaries blurred, inevitably some parts of us muddled. Our first kiss was shared at Aunt Ginny’s in a booth opposite to a party of six. I pulled away quickly and scanned the room. No one was watching us. Intuitively you knew I had strict parents. I knew you had done this before. That night you fucked off my fake eyelashes, spending the better part of the next week finding little bits of me around your room. You decided to begin collecting me. On our next date we skipped the formalities. Decidedly there was no need to court me with $20 cocktails. To you, it must’ve seemed obvious that I was already smitten. To me, I felt I’d be made a fool. I tried to prevent this. On my way out I’d make sure to take every bit of myself with me.

Except I didn’t. I’d be back for my bra. Then I’d sleep next to you and forget my glasses in the morning. When I’d come for no reason at all I’d find you harboring my lipgloss atop your desk, which you mistook for another one of your industrial grade paint supplies in its hearty aluminum tubing. In a morbid way, it was meant to be wasn’t it? Acredit it to my forgetfulness sure, but take into account the perfect set of circumstances leading me to continue giving myself to you. So now you can see why things had to end the way they did. It was fate.

The white blanket, white walls, your white skin on the navy sheets; me observing your milky sleep situated in emancipated beer froth and dried semen. It was all too much. I- rendered motionless by my fear of being known- meditated on our current situation. I had spent another night laid rigidly beside you, close to comatose but unable to let go. Despite having drink after drink my awareness only clung on tighter leaving me overwhelmingly sober. Tension pressed against the marrow in my bones while my muscles twitched in anticipation. Still, I laid stiff. With a deep exhale, you shifted yourself to me. Your left arm came down, not on your side or your front but instead on my waist, palming my navel.

Just before we went to sleep, you asked to have sex. When you finished, you turned over, giving me silence. You did not touch me. You did not say goodnight. You considered penetration to be close enough. If we weren’t through I would’ve warned you; intimacy in doses is quite dangerous. Unrestricted access to the flesh for hedonistic behavior of the lusty variety is swiftly punishable by natural order. Emotional castration at the very least. By the time you touched me in the morning I had come around to the same unspoken conclusion as you. I looked at your hand laying limply on me, your cuticles still stuffed with plaster from the day shift, looking stronger than I’d remembered. I could laugh at myself for nearly taking to admiring you in that moment. Still, my decision was firm. That was close enough.

Your spackling tool sat on a cardboard box, filled with the miscellaneous equipment that holds your life together, just behind my head. While you fucked me doggy style hours earlier, my mind wandered, sight settling on that fine tool. The momentum sent me forward and back and forward and back allowing for the light to catch the smooth steel triggering my prophetic vision. Now on my back I didn’t have to look or search— I could feel its location. And like the little psychic you were, you sensed I was awake. I felt your fingers splay, grip, and pull me closer. Propping yourself up, you stared down at me and I, up at you. You closed your eyes and leaned in. Alone in your darkness, I feared what conclusions you may be coming to.

I snaked my arms above me, stretching and arching into you, sharply inhaling as your lips met mine while your hand took to cradling my moon face. I was all shiny now and I knew it. I was willing to be that girl for you. Upon exhaling, I closed my left hand around the little tool. I slipped my right arm over your shoulder, holding you close, buying just a moment to secure my grip. You pulled away slowly, tenderly caressing my face as if— as if there was a way things could’ve ended differently. Within a few seconds my hand jutted past your face, your eyes tracking the item you couldn’t quite make out. Just a glint. Or glare.

Momentarily, we’re standing in your kitchen again. You’re showing me the spackle tool, or putty knife, or paint scraper, an item I didn’t know came by so many names. I suppose I remember the variations because I’m crazy about wall construction. I don’t think you told me because you thought I cared for it. I suppose these experiences are so weighty in my hands now because they still contain you. Holding the knife to your palm, you demonstrated its sharpness. Dangerous, you warned me. The corner of the blade dragged across your palm, steady and slowly. You did not flinch. We waited, disappointed that the danger might’ve been a farce. Then a red thread appeared, ribboning right before us. It was here I forgot to think. I grabbed your bleeding hand greedily and put your palm to my unparted lips. In one move I revealed my whole hand. I wasn’t merely here to consume you. I cared. That’s what ruined everything. You moved your hand to replace them with your lips. Before I fell into your embrace, I looked at it just one more time.

There was no resistance when I slit your throat, I hardly bothered to do a second pass. I expected the blade to get caught on muscle or cartilage, instigating some sort of violence. Alas, your trachea gaped wide for a tick before spurts began to rain down on me. My vision was stained red even with my eyes closed but I did not turn away. I allowed myself to be. Your blood was going through my nose, finding your way to my throat, choking me. I opened my mouth to draw in air but I took in more of you.

It’s like you were stuck. I expected you to reach for your throat frantically, to assess the damage or simply out of shock, something. But you looked down on me as I expected you might’ve until you were completely drained. It wasn’t until I shoved you that your body reanimated at 5x speed, frantically clutching and grasping and dying. I focused on coughing up whatever congealed in my esophagus, wiping my face almost to your level of desperation, but not quite. You were fighting death and I was being born again, baptized in your holiest fluid. I was ecstatic, not frantic.

By the time I could clearly see again, you were already gone, still and beautiful on your bedroom floor. It was far too messy to go through all the parts of you I never got to explore. Ideally, I would’ve liked to live in you for a few days. It’s for the best I didn’t desecrate your corpse, to have forced you to have made room for me in death. Alive, you wouldn’t have had a change of heart, so I simply stopped it from beating. I desired you in such a repressive manner I crushed every solid gift you gave me, every plausible chance we had of getting close. You leaned into the opportunity. It’s for the best things ended the way they did.

Only a week ago I was experiencing all the classic symptoms of depression: anxiety, apathy, agitation, discontentment, excessive crying, guilt, irritability, hopelessness, loss of interest, lack of pleasure, mood swings, and sadness.

Today I woke up and felt true unadulterated joy.

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Souleyman, for those who don’t know, and today I’m reading my poem titled ‘Where Art My Lady’. Here it goes…

His nose is big. I wouldn’t describe it as grecian or artfully vast, as it takes up the expanse of his face in a more demanding way. One’s attention is inevitably drawn to it at first glance. It would be a hefty Mexican dollop of sour cream, not the kind on whatever scale is used to measure dainty European noses in all their beautiful propagandized perfection. Sincerely, his nose is quite a bit larger than that of the averagely large nose and to acknowledge it would do a great deal of justice to the portrait you are now constructing. His nose was big, as were all his features. His lips, equally sized in length and width were scarily plump, verging on what one may mistake for swollen. Protruding passed his broad nose (as, despite the sheer size, its broadness was met with a rather flat form), his lips parted naturally if he did not keep them pursed. I can see why the boy writes beautiful prose on the female form-- it was almost a shame to study him.

His skin was of a mahogan hue, rich and complex and inviting in the light. Harsh and inauspicious in shadows, a dimly lit staircase, or the back of our lecture hall. One could conclude it was his stature, standing at a whopping 6 foot 5 inches, it may be the culprit for his intimidating aura. One could also deduce that it came from fear, as in he doesn’t look much like me and probably not you either, reader. His eyes, the deep-set tunnels that simultaneously bore into and drew a great distance from others. His eyelids are heavy with fat on an otherwise fine face, with one brow slightly lower than the other carrying scar tissue of an incident I was fascinated to know of. There is no dazzling variety of browns in his irises, just the color you mistake for black every time, but I find it to be reminiscent of deep, dark, moist earth. I see myself in them. But who’s got his tongue? Rimbaud? Rilkes? So long as it’s not Bukowski, he’s got my attention.

Perhaps a grandiose delusion, but I believe I could be the pretty little lady to crack his core. For a man who meditates on a woman's beauty is always a producer of poetry born from physicality. Oh yes, in falsified adoration, I am reduced to little more than a lily whose petals make up my fleshy labias with vines running down my legs, wrapping around his ankles and dragging him towards my yoni, to which he is powerless. If I’m lucky, there is mention of my face, likely my childbearing hips and gratuitous thighs. I am a seductive theory, a sexy object. It is not a protest to write of his mediocrity-- if I am in such a lust driven world let me speak my truth in its entirety: poetic musings are only so nourishing.

It was Joan Didion on self-respect that birthed the realization-- it is a cop out to live within literature. ‘Remain[ing] the secondary character in your own motion picture’ a song dear to me goes. Processing everything as a scene, formulating life into a manuscript is lazy work. The book will never get written. This boy, he can spend a great deal of time fixated on women, studying their mannerisms, bodies, the twitch of their buttocks while standing in line, but he will never know her. What he would ask of her is to ‘be normal’. To act according to his predestined script of what it would be like to know her. This normalcy cares not of her genuine wellbeing, but her wellbeing in relation to him. When she inevitably blooms exposing her tender stamen, the poetry will cease to flow and he will leave her. Wilted, at that.

It is not a safe world for him and I cannot blame him for finding refuge in prose. But why bodies he’s never been in? Examining him now, I’m quite unsure of how I will proceed. His hands were grecian ironically, the likes of a God. His pen is a feeble toothpick and I only have an idea of the potential web of veins to explode when he applies pressure. I wished he would put it down and slam the podium in some passionate display of masculinity or aggression. I drifted, imagining my neck in place of the pen. I enjoy an expression of sexuality I fear he will only meditate on in his lifetime. Despite outward appearance, he was soft and delicate. I wanted to take advantage of it. I wanted to be his anti-muse.

To be deemed conservative and moral publicly, to then act like a feral rabbit behind closed doors is to be a hypocrite. I do not shy away from the label. He needs to know I am a cold-case with very little information to gather but on my good graces. To get off, and get off good, I need to demonstrate flagrant indifference to his existence. He is another classmate of whom I astutely give my undivided attention. Backwards, perhaps, but the real play is in the poker face. He’s looked up to address the room, twice, three times now finding my eyes. I have a tendency to glaze over in the presence of my peers so whether it was his first time seeing me in this lecture hall, I can't say, but it was undoubtedly his first time seeing me see him. Moments like this make a man nervous. Was this poem a declaration of hunting or merely baiting? I’ve never noticed him before and he doesn’t speak a language I find particularly endearing, but his piece reads as a call to action. Who is it you’re looking for, my love, and are you really ready to meet her?
I already feel my bones snapping and shredding, preparing to be cast in a new mold, severing myself to slip perfectly into his syntax, “Romeo! Oh where art thou Romeo?”

I wanted to play and he was up to bat.

yeama h. bangura

Intimacy in Doses

Lecture Hall No.1