Crush

Lily received the vibrator in a box labeled Fragile. Nothing fragile can make me come, her roommate Jenny joked, that’s why I don’t do men anymore. They carried the box up the stairs together, lugging it from the doorway of their apartment building. Though the package was no bigger than a brick, it was astoundingly heavy, and they

had to stop every few steps and shift their sweaty fingers into a new position.
In the kitchen of their apartment, which also served as the living room and Lily’s bedroom, they pried off the tape and yanked open the flaps of the box. Inside was a vibrator. It was swathed in sixteen layers of pearl-pink tissue and slept inside a silky sleeve. After snagging the fabric with her scabbed knuckles, Lily confirmed that the sleeve was made of real silk: it partnered with the light to achieve flight, fluttering up to the ceiling. The vibrator, on the other hand, was stone- heavy and dense, shaped like an arrowhead with a slightly rounded tip. It lay flat in Lily’s palm,

its skin soft and pulsing, a fruit on the brink of birthing its seed.
Jenny reached into the box and withdrew a pamphlet printed with fine text. She read it aloud:

At our company, we take The Business of Pleasure very seriously. We do not believe in vibrators that pass as lipsticks or stress balls or bath bombs. Disguise is innovation, but it is also dampen- ing. We believe in the memory of machinery. In cultivating a real relationship with the tenderest of technologies. Jenny stopped reading and shook her head.

roamed, her senses reaching as deep as the soil’s singing

where she stood, trees budded like tongues wind raking through her branches, pleasure

she breaches the dirt converting water into girth

jacketing her extremities

comes into the world navigating her roots through total darkness

she hounds her own hands, pries them from prayer

her body deboned of belief she gathers rain in her gutter-length hair, growing back

her knees her name is grief the way a tree

measures its years in thirst

morning publishes her bed

as bloodstain

beginning shunning its born shape, a lisp

she is a bone