First published in 21 Stars Review, Feb. 2007 (electronic)
My lover Blanchot is going through his fascist period. In the past his periods were leftist. Liberal left, Marxist Left, literary theory lined under the bursting post-structuralists. Labor Left when he was called agitator and communist. The ideology of him, the pink of him, the shifting, lifting pen of him. Far out like a seagull, pigeon-eyed, meaty hands, bannered and unborn and beside himself. I can exploit his work like a bourgeoisie.
He avoids me flimsily, fancying a French lover. He sings in my book bag, drips a thick, pink mucous on my other affects. He says, “You don’t need to be Derrida to see the differance.” I know the game. I know enough to shut the cover and make some tea. I’m not a heavyweight. He can smell the lightness in me and that makes him brazen. That’s what makes my fat lover smooth me. How he smoothes me. Massages me down with nonsense till I’m as smooth as he is. We’re smooth for each other we laughing fascists. We milky way, galactic, greedy singers get loose with longing. You are porous enough for my hips like hearts, I will cover you with my fingertips, cover you with my nighttime breath. Cover girl theorist with the weight of the world. My political lover makes a soup out of me. He circles me and in his pink sweet offerings I am taken. I like the going out to cafes, the long jackets, the glasses. I like his shiny cover, the clean white stiff of print. It is he who gives me the power of the word. I used it once but when I wrote back to him it was my clad-iron jaw that eroded in absence. He lays beside me, dangerous as James Dean. His little pink cover and white underwear deceptively exact. I slept in sweat and couldn’t speak in my broken dreams. We are suffering lovers, we two.
