Laura Paul

WEDDING VOWS FOR FIVE HUSBANDS

I have sex with your leg. Not with your penis, but with your leg. Your knee does not enter me, but turns me on. What is it to have sex then?

When I read I want to be rearranged. When I have sex I want to experience something outside of myself through the limits of my body—I want to experience the body of another. I want to lick skin that isn’t mine and smell breath I can taste because I cannot usually taste my own breath. I want to smell the organisms that compose your scalp through the rough texture of your hair because your composition is not my own.

How is birth even related to this experience? Maybe it is the experience of the unknown. Because most people don’t remember, I will tell you what it is to be born, to be born into the unknown—

You enter into an open area you have never been before. The unknown is bright. It is filled with sounds and rules you have never heard. In fact, you have never known a rule, you do not know what that is. You have been undistinguished—you do not know the rule of clothes or that it is illegal for you to take five husbands. You do not know what a tax is. You do not wear clothes, you do not know what a husband is. Your clothes up until this point have been a membrane, your husband a placenta.

Up until this point you are joined to which you did not know could be separate from you. I think this is why to have sex. Did you know you are not always alone, that you could multiply?

When I fly out of myself I am not restricted by the limits of a poverty of being. We are all a poverty of being when we do not experience union, do not experience another being—personal, mineral, or mug. I had sex with a leaf just the other day. And the city sidewalk and a rolling car. It is not predatory, it is opening. I am not one thing, my environment can become part of myself.

When I take five husbands we commit to each other. Commit to not having restrictions of being. This is not about possession, or gathering objects to hoard. This is about privatization being rude greed, so instead I will private you through taking you into what is private about me, into my intimacy, my privates, where union can afford to open up onto the world. I offer you intimacy because I love you all. You are my five husbands, my placenta, myself.

THE CLITORIS ALWAYS STAYS OUTSIDE

How can the clitoris be mysterious, subtle, weak-willed, or vulnerable when the clitoris always stays outside?

There’s a way that dicks hide, always going inside, being sucked into some sort of sheath or opening.

The digestive system has no closing, only temporaneous moments of enough.

Penises come and go, weaving into all sorts of textures, like silk thread, like bidets and wet and warmth, like terry cloth, like looped and uncut threads, like assholes and mouths, like any sort of opening devoid of too many sharp metal teeth.

Straight and long genitalia that curves and bends. Always exploring in order to find a lace to close down and rest. Always a retreat.

An end of the day sale, a discount store that locks the doors shut. Slithering into bed, hoping for a clean place to stay the night. Limited by four walls and enough. Straightforward, and too straight. Undraped.

But the clitoris is no intrepid explorer hungry for a dormitory or bergerie or refuge.

The clitoris, that which cannot be penetrated, that which cannot be wholly sucked.

Glands that are seen, but never fully seen. Asking for repetition, but also undulation, pulsation, difference, contrast, fantasy, back and forth, &&&&&

&so avoidant

&so impossible

&so dominant&multidimensional

&so tall, but long, but wide, but fat, but

The clitoris always stays outside.