Landscape: In Parts

Pleasure. Soft, small, ephemeral. Medical labs, shiny, bare smell of cleanliness, rubber and needles. I sit, latex tube around my arm, make a fist, squeeze. You rub me with alcohol, we stare at my skin and you find a vein close to the surface. I watch your concentration and smell you: beautiful, sparse, like a hospital. Such comfort in hospitals, their simple structures, I always think of them as hallways and rooms, white boxes and rectangles, silver lines, 90 degree angles, security of ammonia, Clorox, latex. We watch silver go inside a specific, tiny part of me. Outside and inside sensation simultaneously and the magnetic color and your sterilized parts and tubes and vials and all of it so small, and leaving just a little ache in the inside of my elbow. My fluid extracted and contained and labeled, tapped with such cleanliness, gentleness, all of your pretty sterility.

*

The scratch of a mother’s callused hand after slapping your seven-year-old face. The brother collecting worms to hide at the bottom of your dinner plate, you eating them, straight-faced and proud. Watching the boy cry in his sleep, the chalky taste of cement after falling from the attic, the father in the dark room. Those years about future delight, about pleasure soon. The ring around your neck after a long night with that girl. Cutting your fingernails into little arrows, digging them into your thighs at the dinner table, and then into your brother’s, and imagining your mother’s face. Getting caught stealing panties and jock straps and Playgirl and Penthouse, wooden benches in locker rooms, splinters and fights and sucking cock. Practicing a smile to hide wrinkles and teeth, hitting a dog running across the road, never stopping or even slowing down. That redhead, choking you with all of her spit, scratching your butt with intended affection. The weight of your tongue in your mouth, that purple mark on your hip, watching it all from the surface of your skin, turning to blue and eventually to green.

*

The allure and sadness of navels. Navels are the only mark we have of being inside, the insides of her. And then outside, we survived the separation but not without difficulty.

*

Tell me everything. Not until your letter arrived today did I realize how I miss you. Swing your leg over my belly, tell me what you did today. Let me sit in the kitchen and watch you, where did you learn to chop like that? I always want to go home. I’m a bit snobbish, totally broke, but I’ve got good credit and good booze, I’m deaf in my left ear, I’ve gotten stitches in odd places, I’ve lost, car keys and babies and sobriety.

*

The loveliness and terror of aquariums. Cool, damp, and dim, plexi electronic uterus boxes, huge humming machines with parts swimming inside. If the water were thick, if our lungs could be flooded, who else would jump in with the fish? I would be satisfied being one strand of kelp or an eel, or even a little octopus. What joy to have that plum-colored ink, all of those legs and every one with cupped suckers – imagine your fluidity, your grasp, your look of fetus flesh, the tingling tips of your eight legs as you swam into chilly waters.

Sarah Matsuda revels in experimental, edgy, and juicy literature that defies the norms. A visceral and tactile hybridization of text, spinning somewhere deep within the brain to give a whole new experience of what can be defined. Sex, violence, memory, and the presence of the body are the central elements of her work. She rejects tradition and the conventional forms of literature in favor of extreme rebellion to history. She is the author of two books, smother (Lacuna Press, 1999), and slink (Lacuna Press, 2002). She received her MFA from Art Center College of Design and lives in Colorado. Her work has been published in Bending Genres and the Blue Mountain Review (winter 2021).