I took it and I made it flat. I curled my fingers around it so as to maximize contact. I contracted and made everything as tight and short as possible until it couldn’t stay the same. It broke, and the middle fell out, and then it became a piece of nothing. I held the piece of nothing in my hand. It had to be cut lengthwise. I trimmed it so it would be easy to twist into a loop. I made the thing into a strip, a band, and enclosed it. It seemed to have a hole, but I told my friend it wasn’t possible to orient, that it didn’t make sense to say it had a hole in it. I rolled it into a crumpled page and began to write on it, it had to be held flat by the pen.

During the 1890s Fliess was gathering a massive body of (what he considered) scientific research, in an effort to provide evidence for three unusual ideas. The first of these was a new and rather complicated concept that Fliess believed to be a ‘reflex neurosis’ emanating from the nose. Fliess postulated a special physiological connection between the nose and the genitalia, an association he centred on certain ‘genital spots’ located on the nasal turbinate. Both men believed that sexual perversions, in particular masturbation, played a key role in the causation of neurotic illnesses. They also believed that displacements occurred in such illnesses. Freud had coined the term displacement with respect to psychological illness. He believed that by shifting one’s concern from the real problem, one could siphon off any anxiety by obliterating any connection with the true source of one’s worries. Thus Freud believed in a psychological basis for displacement. Fliess, on the other hand, believed that the displacement was a result of the conflict shifting anatomically from the genitals to the nose. He further suggested that the only way to deal with such a problem then was to intervene physically by operating on the nose. Fliess asserted that the actual genital spots on the turbinate bone could be treated surgically: mild cases could be cocainized, intermediate cases cauterized with hot wires and serious masturbators, who had developed hypertrophic rhinitis, were treated with a turbinectomy. He believed so strongly in the naso-genital link that he also held that these methods would also ease a number of gynaecological disorders including the pain of labour! It has been suggested, however, that the systemic absorption of the cocaine alone would be capable of alleviating labour pain rather than any direct effect of the cocaine on the genital spots. (“Freud’s friend Fliess,” Annie Riddington Young, The Journal of Laryngology & Otology, December 2002, Vol. 116, pp. 992-995.)

At that angle, the skewed line goes in.

The letters need to be pruned to enter my cunt.

Some names do it better than others.

Is the air which instantiates voice through the contraction of the vocal apparatus apprehensible by some as nothing but letters, scrawled onto the flattest and most bendable of surfaces? Mutation is a consequence of the structure of the living, with its need for unorientable folding and wrinkling. A thing pressed flat carries the symbolic matter of the living but it is deathless. A breeze moves along an inner membrane which is mendable and moldable and never not wet; the outer organ is that which bears markers and traces of cancerous growth, exposed to the sun and its machinic defacement. This is the tensile strength of the braid between female and male notions of language.

I look in the mirror and the image of my ass makes my nose quiver until I sneeze in the next room. That image of my ass is an inaudible audience to my desire. When I see that ass on the other side of the glass I am not I who sees myself, I inhabit some other viewer’s vision. But the glass is between us. This viewer can’t pass to the other side.

I do not write in the place of masturbation; masturbation leads directly to sleep, which leads to waking up to do something entirely different. Sometimes, though, I wake up and masturbate again. This could be a self-sufficient cycle. How does one write about something so perfect?

Knees bent, sitting on the chest of the recumbent dreamer with cock angled towards the trachea, as if the obscure hard object with only its wet urethral crease clearly visible were a trephine meant to drill a hole in the windpipe and render the subject permanently mute, the way it should be. Why he wouldn’t force it down my throat is a mystery.

He wants to choke me with his cock from the outside, the least plausible way, the way that’s bound to make his cock bend into breaking pain. It’s hard talking about this fixation on getting plugged up. Tell me about your sexual proclivities, asks a stranger on the internet. I’m not sure if I’m doing research or if I’m just resting. I’m avoiding a more serious desire for someone I already know, who lives just down the street. Saving the most important for last, for never, for when I can emerge more decisively as a real and immediate woman?

— What are you into?
— Your cock is everywhere.
— You’re into my cock being…
— No, not it being everywhere.
— Then what?

It’s an orb of absence, it’s a sign of response.

It’s a winged creature, it’s a messenger, it’s a joke.

It’s a thing to write on. Tattoo it and watch the anamorphosis.

It’s not mine. It’s pure difference.

The joke of the day is that anything difficult or impossible to subitize, anything that comes in a quantity greater than four, is spermatomorphic. Twenty-five baby orchids are spermatomorphic. Seven pens bought independently are spermatomorphic in their redundancy. When the Youtuber complains about having bought too many sweaters (ten) she’s complaining about the mess or taste of soured milk. A chain of five funny tweets are five sperm from one emission. Neurotic variations on the same theme partake of ejaculative thinking. The basis of all tropes is the dyad of the spermatic and the ovarian. There are many eggs, many more than four, but they drop in a finite span and with monthly show. The deciduous dropping of the egg onto the placental tissue, itself deciduous, is a double fall. They used to joke about exchanging and ingesting each other’s menstrual blood. Placenta and sperm are completely unalike; twenty-five baby orchids are not like the lining of my womb.

When I get angry my womb starts to wander.

When I see him seeing me my womb starts to fall out.

I secretly crave someone who isn’t anything but absent.

My face is a red rose, I only want to get inseminated.

The paper begins to dissolve as it comes into contact with me.

I tolerate nothing beyond the thing that is so intense that it never stops not being written,
I calculate nothing, I tolerate with measure, I am a calculated and regular waste of paper.