See the Face of God and Live

Deacon is short, wiry, athletic, naked. I’m never naked.

His blinking asshole opens then closes against my tongue, its breath earthy, warm. Thighs flattening either ear, muscled ass cheeks spread apart around my nose. Deacon faces away from my splayed arms pinned beneath his shins. Deacon jacks off lazily. Asks where I want his cum.

“Like I care,” feigning a yawn, he pulls my shorts sideways, grabs my pussy hard. I yelp. He lets go, slapping the red skin. Laughs. 

“You’re so dumb.” Deacon leans more weight onto my face. I can’t breathe. His hand pushes beneath my underwear, he tugs at my clit.

My hips buck. I moan into his second mouth.

Sometimes during good sex the other person’s body becomes a phantom limb belonging to me. Flesh, blood, muscle nearly imagined but explicit, unshakeable, full of shooting nerve.

“You’re a stupid, disgusting slut. I love using your face like toilet paper.”

What light! Proof of something once alive lingering beyond reach.

Every inch of our invisible skin hurt as it appeared to us; already dead, immortal as God. Brighter.

Most stars died ages ago.

Before blood drunk pirates navigated home beneath shimmering constellations of corpses. Before towns had street lamps. Most stars died before your great grandmother’s great grandmother got her Christian name. Before America and Africa and Europe and Asia.

Before we made up stories about god and dissected his sky into origins. Before crucified messiahs and pardoned thieves. Before laws carved stone. Before we learned how to cut the cord with anything other than our sharp, animal teeth.

Stars become. Later they evaporate into themselves—a billion beautiful cunts blooming. Inverting back into singular bleating nerves. Black holes. Pinpricks of blinding, incalculable weight. Invisible. Swallowing. Starving.

Hallowed pores: Time travelers. Time deniers. Things that bore time once, before throwing babies out with their bathwater.

Stars eviscerated on the same day as Jesus emit light that will glow long after the death of humankind. Light we can’t even see yet is barreling like a cumshot straight from their dense graves toward our watery, squinting faces.

In church they said Jesus is all that; light forever, even after flesh destroyed became ordinary, devotionless dirt.

Nothing is forgotten; everything unrecognizable.

What’s the difference between cemeteries and constellations?

Deacon buries his knuckles in my wet yawning cunt, unfolding his fist. I expand, like universes do. Something we can’t quite see is born again and again in my dank bedroom. It cries. We swallow it.

I’m 27 years old, an infant dragging around its afterbirth, a stone of flesh rolling across the earth for millenia.

“You aren’t allowed to come.” Deacon looks over his shoulder, “Don’t look away from me,” He says. I watch his bicep muscles twitch as he strokes himself. “You’re a greedy fucking whore.” 

At twelve I was raped for the last time. It happened many times, almost exactly how it happened that last time, but if you want details, my brain shutters, TV static. I’m not sure why the last time sticks how it does, except that somehow I knew, as it happened, this was it. 

I’ve heard stories of people that die and return; their clarity in unbecoming.

I believe in God.

He led me into the woods. He was a few years older than me; an honor roll student addicted to Ritalin his father prescribed, underdog of his school wrestling team, twice prom king. His girlfriend was a vegetarian. We were children.

I don’t remember everything. I cried so hard my tear duct swelled to the size of a tooth, later becoming infected. In another version of the same memory I don’t cry; silent, slumped motionless, tree bark teething at my sunburn. Face dry as my prepubescent cunt. In still another version of this moment I beg, dogmouthed.

Someone’s coming, they’ll see. Please stop. Someone’s coming.

If form no longer exists, but its absence is silhouetted by light once cast from its weight, is form reborn or simply recalled?

It always ends: He pulls out because I’m too dry, makes himself cum on my thigh. Then somehow I am on the ground, in the dirt. He hits me across the face, stomach, chest. “Look at me, what’s wrong with you, look at me,” He says. Then he’s crying, “Why won’t you look?”

He curls into a ball, rests his blonde head on my lap, apologizes. I place both hands on his head, gently massaging his scalp. I stare past oranging leaves that shimmer beneath September sunlight. I touch his hair, coo his name. “You’re okay,” I say. “I’m okay. It’s okay.”

Sometimes I remember shapes we made and picture us as constellations, shiny dead clusters, creating some kind of story I could retell again and again to make a point or learn something.

Deacon dismounts my face. Turns around, kneels beside my torso and holds my chin in one hand, the other still inside me.

“Whose hole is this?” His thumb dragging down my clit.

“Yours,” I start to cry. Loud, bottomless.

“I can stop,” Deacon promises, his thumb making slower, softer passages across my clit, the rest of his fingers stilled phantom pains inside me, “Or you can come now. What do you want?”

“Make me cum,” snot runs over my lips, down my cheeks, into my hair.

Deacon demands I cum so I do.

He lies down. I curl into a ball, my head on his lap. He places one hand in my hair, then the other. He massages my scalp, coos my name.

“You did good,” Deacon says. “You’re so good.”

Somewhere in the past a star eviscerates. Unbecoming into a vacuum of slick, unbearable weight. But right here, right now, its light beats unadulterated, a chapel of warm blood, a beacon blinking back into the wide eyes of a human who was once a girl;

I came, I came all this way just to see you. Be not afraid. ⏱