Spirited IV // Plastic City

aback. She licks her lips. She has already caught his wrist. She whispers.

“Le truc en plastique” her blood is pounding “c’est comme la pilule”. And her pronunciation she judges perfect, and his comprehension she judges complete. The oral passed, the perfect score, the ecstasy of self-creation. She pulls out the thing & clatters it on the parquet. Her plastic truc is shining, not two feet across the floor. The streetlights seem to zig-zag on its surface in a rhythm like a jackhammer. She watches this. She is undeterred by the distraction.

Even if he goes all night, she will stay in the clean interior place that he can validate but not control. The luscious, unresponsive night. How lovely to be dry and worldly. She was so understood. In the morning, she will finger the plastic bulb, reinsert it, say, A la prochaine she thinks. The mattress squeals it. He is fucking steadily. Ou quoi -The sound- Ou quoi? Ou-quoi-ou-quoi-ou-quoi-ou-quoi.

“A la prochaine,” she forms the words beneath her breath, “ou quoi?”

3 There are schools of colored tubes beached along the lakeshore, made of pearlized pastel plastic. To her, they appear robotic. She has only recently learned what they’re for. She has only recently learned not to pick them up with bare hands. They are things that look like they ought to screw into a matching interior threading. The plastic is the same grade as a low-grade Barbie. The vagina might as well have an interior threading. She has never used a tampon. Toxic shock syndrome is a spectral monster at sixteen. So is her vagina. Unseen place that grows hair around itself. Unseen place, with unseen interior threading that accepts objects, whole, that leaves the applicator behind the way space travel leaves the launching equipment. The launching equipment swims in pearlized pastel schools. The National Honor Society forms an outing to pick them up. But between the rocks, the pastel plastic still looks up at her, from so many gaps,