Music for a Wedding by Lauren Clark

Author:Lauren Clark [Clark, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822982975
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

TWO WEDDINGS

On the night of the wedding, after the happy couple has disappeared to

wherever they were going to go, someone bets that you can’t pick up a girl

by only talking about unicorns. You have never won any bets

or had casual sex, but you try, mostly

out of frustration, and somehow

it works. You sit down next to a girl who happens

to have a miniature tapestry of The Unicorn in Captivity

hanging above her bed in her apartment. It seems like a joke

but within an hour this stranger is lying

naked on a mattress before you. It seems like a joke

even as you approach her vulva with your face. But,

you find, you know before contact how the reality

of contact will be. It will be

—primordial is the wrong word, but

wet red clay, some early Earth, some landscape

you know although you have never seen it,

a place where the ground is so wet you can’t stand

on but rather only in.

Then there’s a clitoris

against your lips, this soft moving

which you never set out to discover.

You nudge it with your tongue.

It is uncontainable.

You cannot rein it in or surround it.

You cannot even pin it down, because

it does not stay in one place. The stranger

opens her eyes, tells you to move

left. Left,

what is left in this whole groundless world

but an approximate. And the sounds

of the remaining wedding guests

moving beyond the door, out in the hallway,

and the memory of everyone

throwing orange rose petals and snap bombs

after the Just Married mobile in the twilight. The girl

looks sideways at you, down or over

her whole body, and you know

what you fear. It’s neither

the pleasure nor the texture

nor the bet.

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