The Map of Amsterdam
The Map of Amsterdam What does love search for if not to grow wings and become a hermaphrodite. Is it not the obsession of the loved one to burn your summer until you cook like escargot and die? (I was kneeling in front of him, my mouth on his hardness. His knees trembled and swayed. When I looked up his eyes were closed and he asked: Do you love me? ) Love, immobile happiness of the swamp. Who was he to my intimate places to ask me that discomforting question? Did his wings carry the same dark dirt as my map. Had he found my scent in Paris and lost me in the canals of Amsterdam? Had he found that place in me — the where where he could always return? ii. I had fallen in love with a man who had a name to protect. I shut myself up in the bedroom for days buried under shame. Friends brought me look-a-likes, but it only made me smell of bitter sweat and dead gardenias. I’d listen to them speak as if from a far distance, eyelids heavy, like stones swollen with salty wetnes