Lust Series (2)
by Stephanie Dickinson

When your lust is done with me I’m gonna need a hearse. This fanbelt snapping is just another excuse. I’m not a tool. I’m tired and dry. I want to lie down in river water. Your fingers lock the steering wheel, cut off at the knuckles. Super Bowl Sunday the motel sign blinks. Dead green neon like scum trapped in pool bottom under the bourbon of stale rain. There’s where we go pay, I point to a bullet-proof booth like a fast food drive-through. A woman in an orange nightgown sits on a stool, her black face white with night cream. You tap the cracked glass, Ricochet must have done that. A drawer slides out. Eats our money. Then comes a key looped through a wire hanger. I can feel myself disappearing long before you lift me through the door pink as misery, a black number 9 swinging. All the landscape inside me bubbles like shook-up Pepsi. Beaumont refineries, the long tense necks of the naphtha chimneys, the strangling thick Mississippi.

Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Texas, Iowa, Louisiana, and now New York. Her work appears in Cream City Review, Mudfish, Green Mountains Review, PMS, Storyquarterly, Feminist Studies, Ontario Review, Water Stone, Columbia Journal, and the McGuffin, among others. Along with Rob Cook, she publishes and edits the literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. Her novel Half Girl, recently published by Spuyten Duyvil, won the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel of 2002. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” appears in Best American 2005 Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. Rain Mountain Press has recently released her short story collection, Road of Five Churches, and she is a 2006 fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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