REBECCA GAYDOS

VERKEHR
                        for S.

One word for: Commerce Traffic Sex Metaphor Devil

To turn away from something, or to turn across, this is how anything can circulate. You have to press on the word to see all these meanings. You have to squeeze it down.

It could be a passageway or an imbalance
set against a great desire for symmetry. My mom said the more symmetrical a face is, the more attractive

For instance: signage on a trail, any trail, say the James Irwin Trail in Prairie Creek Redwoods SP. There are signs when the trail forks. Soft needles on the ground, ferns everywhere. There is no grass in a forest. Rivulets and a natural drain in the ground. Bridges to connect the trail or to keep hikers drily suspended over water. The trail curves. It cuts a system through an area in which everything happens once. You can’t return anywhere if everything is only happening one time. The trail makes it so you can go back, and you can go back the same way that you came. We expect this. We expect to be able to go back the same way that we came if we so choose. If we don’t want to make a loop of it, then by all means, we expect to have the option to go back the same way out that we went in. We weren’t going there forever. We weren’t going there with no thought of what we’d do next. We go as an excursion. It will take 4 hours or so. We will come back by the same trail because that is precisely what a trail is. The very definition of a trail is to give us a system that appeals to our senses, that is user-friendly, that takes us back out the very same way, no matter how different it looks or how tired you feel going back. You could even have other trails, unofficial trials. The common thread would simply be finding something stable to latch onto. You’d have to glean consistency and then out of that consistency you can make a trail. Or you can physically alter the space to lay one down.    I’m surprised women like me are allowed on trails at all. I saw two very young children running down the trail completely unaccompanied. A mile later there was a woman with a walkie-talkie. An extended form of keeping track of one’s progeny.   Even with a man-made trail, I still have to drug myself to take a stroll into any forest at all. I know I’ll lose my progeny. It’ll just come shooting out of me like fiddlehead ferns ready to unroll. And then what will happen to all those episodes of Friends in which Monica’s infertility is associated with her modernity, her bourgeois lifestyle, and her general anal retention?

HATCHDAY

Los Angeles is a city notorious for its dependence on remote resources, like power plants 600 miles away, and water delivered from elsewhere through 400 mile long aqueducts. These mountains, where we were headed, are the space between … The collision of faults and plates has made for what some geologists call “an epic mess.” In a sense, we were driving through a wall, a really thick one, that has been built up from below, and simultaneously melted down from above.

—Center for Land Use Interpretation,
 Entry on The Grapevine

Straight women, I’ve begun to suspect, don’t write well about desiring men. If I want to see my sexual feelings toward men represented in writing, I read gay men.

Many of Andrea Dworkin’s descriptions of compulsory heterosexuality do describe how I feel on the inside. And they are descriptions, unfortunately, of desire, not just of pain.

In a clinical setting, I was trained to understand ‘sex positivity’ as simply respecting the many attitudes toward sex that people may have. ‘Sex positivity,’ in this clinical setting, was a non-judgmental method of interacting with clients; it wasn’t an endorsement of sex or sexual experience.

How sex physically feels is not the point for me. It’s the interaction that crosses through something: domain change. Samuel Delany is very clear about this in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He tries to think about how to make cruising culture accessible to women, and he’s particularly thinking about women cruising for men. The issue of including women who like dick in gay culture is not central to his book, but it’s not peripheral either. The idea he comes up with is a hotel with guards where women could bring men for casual sex and feel safe because of the guards. I won’t comment on this idea.

What if I don’t quite have a perceptible relationship to risk?

Or if I can’t cross over domains, then I can’t have sex. It’s not impotence in a physical sense. Sex might not cross over domains and then you’re not having it. When Delany and Dworkin, in totally opposed ways, talk about sex they are both talking about a deeper logic, something in which desire itself is not directly in question.

If I can’t leave the subject of sex, if as Patricia Highsmith misogynistically believed, everything women write is tainted with sex, well, then I can’t ever get to it either. I need a good exit, a real exit, if I’m to get a good entrance. The murkiness, sex stories seeping into every word, will destroy any distinction, any space, any possibility that happens between subject matters. If I venture to write something totally desexualized, then I’d be only in one domain with nothing crossing over and nothing crossing under.

When I had morning sickness, I thought I was having too much vertical motion. So instead of the feeling of what’s down below coming on up, I’d imagine my whole body was spreading sideways. You can’t vomit sideways. An imaginary counter-pose is not all that helpful because the body doesn’t reliably respond to mind tricks. But it’s not a bad idea to have a few imaginary counter-poses up one’s sleeve. Driving and fucking are the same thing, so if I had an imaginary counter-pose to driving it could also work for fucking. But there’s not one motion or directional axis associated with either of those issues, so, unlike for vomiting, which is very vertical, for driving, I can’t even begin to come up with a counter-pose or a mind trick of any sort. The closest I get is reading the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s entry on the Grapevine. I’m very interested in how the CLUI describes the Grapevine and I can see in this description the seeds of a truth about California and all the bodies. 

Are you going to come for me? I don’t hate it when men ask that pseudo-question because the ‘for me’ part is amusingly (?) antiquated and thoroughly bizarre. But I wasn’t born yesterday so why not get antiquated with me? for me? Well, people do get antiquated with me, but not so much for me, because my ‘for me’ is not a refrain, being no good at the sentence-level, my for me is straight debt, pure liability and hassle. Like any good or halfway decent bitch, if I wasn’t born yesterday, I wasn’t born at all, which reminds me of an ex-lover who always insisted that he hatched from an egg. We called his birthday his hatchday.

TRUTHFUL LOVE POEM NO. 2

There’s nothing more what I want to do than a medical book describes. Disease, as something my mind could touch on, as the ‘gone wrong’ that reveals something other than the body’s anthropological terms—another set of terms altogether: for me, it is the buildings.

I do not make the buildings, do not participate directly in their making. But I have a pussy, and I’ve used it to play a role in the buildings, however distant. Yes, however distant, I still like to put myself into relation with infrastructure’s bulkier aspects. I’m fine with triangulation. I’m fine with whatever style, be it high theory’s geometric metaphors or a more mundane, servicing operation. If it gets me close, I’m more than delighted. I’m lit through. 

Hospital may be an exemplar of the buildings. As a small child, I loved reading about disease. Perhaps, though, this love had more to do with cutting straight to the exemplary. To be a hospital the quality of hospital has to sink deep. It goes down into the beams of a building, shaping the very blueprint from which the building springs. Even as a child, I could tell it was beyond the knowable, and yet, this society-of-the-known places medical books quite casually, floppingly, you could say, around the houses of the citizenry. Perhaps heaped in a basket, in the bedroom, inside what I would later come to name as a “unit,” a word that isn’t terribly advanced but still seems to exceed the range of an ordinary child’s vocabulary. In a unit, unspoken for in the sense that its terms needn’t be clarified by the look or layout alone, I was drawn up. This way, in what I couldn’t yet name, I would find the bedroom. And in the bedroom, I would find the basket. And in the basket, I would see the heap, see the strewn quality of a medical book, on-hand, hardbacked, endlessly alluring. One day I’d come to know all the management, the way it starts in the heaps, in the bedroom baskets. The way it comes to be done with instruments that get sterilized or at least given a hot rinse. And even back then I knew something akin to this truth. Otherwise why’d any of these medical books get written up? Or why are the hospitals packing themselves each inside the other, down to the point that even the blueprints look and act like some asshole from the art world? But I’m here to write not of love, but of desire’s whereabouts. If I’m scared of buildings, frightened by infrastructure, it’s only because I didn’t see anyone looking like me operating the big cranes. Or rather, I was made to look like I was the one who was far away, or very close but contiguously so, even in the modern era, and even with all the conveniences. I’ll never forget when the wife of the general contractor, who employed B., proposed the photoshoot. The after-work photoshoot. The idea was B. would still be dirty from work, and through the photographs, through the nonfiction framing of us together, as lovers, juxtaposition’s argument would be ready, easy, eminently readable.

Rebecca Gaydos is the author of Güera (Omnidawn 2016). Her poetry and literary criticism appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Boog City, OAR, Cordite Poetry Review, and Journal of Modern Literature. She lives in Palm Desert, California, and teaches English at College of the Desert.