From rep648@casbah.acns.nwu.edu Thu Apr 29 00:34:31 1999 Date: 7 Feb 1997 04:22:56 GMT From: Lady Bathory To: r-pollock@nwu.edu Newsgroups: alt.gothic Subject: Navigating Skin Pain is not a part written into the arrangement of my sexuality. Scars, though, are a recurring theme, marching andante / allegro / allegretto through the papery dermal measures of my Others. My 1st love had a long curling scar across his side from the removal of a dead kidney. My final love bears more than i can count; across his face where other people choose to have piercings. Scars are the cartographical record of the body. I have them, too. One on my knee from a bike wreck at six...my dad's fault. I've seen him cry twice & that injury sparked the 1st. Another on my wrist from an irate kitten, now grown old & died; most people assume it's from a suicide attempt, though. (Silly. Typical, _in stereo_. Utterly unsurprising.) A 3rd on my forehead, a 4th on my left hand, a 5th just beyond my hairline--'what happened?' asks my hairdresser / 'skin cancer,' i reply, to her unspoken horror / & i'm telling the godshonest goddamnedest truth but i can tell she's still not sure. An arachnidian web of artlessly welded dermis documenting events random, trivial, significant, forgotten. & as for the long queue of narrow, translucent lovers wending backwards >from my bedroom door down the hallways of [ti{me]mory}--their faces are blurred & forms hazy, but their scars all stand out angry, livid, red, & vivid in my head. One man whose name i've long since forgotten [may never have known] i remember from the grotesquely fascinating keloidal ridge that ran the length of his calf. Didn't ask how he got it, just stared at it with a morbid fascination (likely brought on by the rolling, roiling, pumpadum backbeat of the shitty Ecstacy that flung us in bed together in the first place). The bluehair prettyboy one-nighter, striated jaggy coil across his pointy ribs from a drunk bumpkin with a glass bottle. He flinched when i touched it carefully with my thumb, even though it'd been there 'for years...since middle school'. I nodded solemnly but poked it again just to watch him shrink away because that's the kind of girl i was back then. The troubled writer prone to bicycle wrecks & broken bones, lumps of her scars blots of Ugly on her too-delicate elbows & scrawny thighs. We traced each other's blemishes with gentle fingers wet with vodka, fumbling through collegiate bisexuality with the determined hedonism of the still-young. & it'd be folly to overlook my obligatory collection of honed-razor-prone, melodramaturgical subculture-monarchs bearing crowns of thorns, fragile orange wings, artfully drawn lipstickmata, & bracelets of angst. I crammed them all back in their chrysales & tried to stitch up the rents. I usually failed. ..&... My now & always dear one, more beautiful to me for the chapters of his life written in incisions & incidents across his sweet face. Fights, accidents, surgical forays, chance modifications documenting [hi{s]tory} I'm learning who you are, my love. I'm seeing who you are in glimpses/palimpsest. I'm drinking water from a wineglass & thinking of your scars. -- Lady Bathory.........Erzabet Travestments, POBox 6028, Evanston, IL 60204 Editor-In Chief, _Tight Rope_.......alt.gothic's Unofficial Literary Zine URL: Email: The Lady's Cod(e)piece v3.0A: GoCD6SB$]xxx[DJ$ TGlAnNr PSaR! cBK(B)k4 V8s M3p1]xxx[R Z** a24 b55 g9L????A m1T@S6$ r5EIs p1Z sNSrNn NNEW HfmS LusIL5