Inside, there’s a nipple…just deal, get used to it, will you: after all, this is the very end of the tip, hard up from the puffy. Down there it’s halfburied, not so deep I can’t reach. A giver of life this earthbound nipple, as if the whole world’s a tit and this, its summating jut — springing forth with gainful fluid. A pap that after I go to take hold, it grows, to poke high out from its setting. This, then, a sacred sucklingplace. I fall myself to the ice that surrounds. A nipple of nipples, The Nipple of, an impossibility made mythic, the mythical made possible, pasteurized or homogenized down, skim a percent then decide whether bile or curd…it’s handhard, fistswollen as it seeks at my mouth: all flesh and fiery areole that rises to rim, as a lip at my lips, its tip distended to glory my pucker. I’m thirsty, hungry for edge, even a lick, would settle for swiping…prostrate, initiatory of suckle. I swaddle my beard around its overcast red, Adam’s red, Edom’s red, the unnaturally bloodcoursed, applerashed…having a difficult time because I’m sucking, or trying, and nothing, I’m losing my breath. My mouth stabbed by a phantom. I stroke the whole length, then, attempting to milk the flabelliform thing with hands filthy and rough — in a satisfaction unwashed, and unblessed, this resurrection of the breast of every mothering woman: my sisters’, Ima’s and her mother’s, her mothers’ Imas’ yadda and blah bladdering forever around and around this hefty sphere, this sustenant orb…
What milk it gives is intermittent, initially, comes stuttering spurty, comes darkly soured, but with gum and gulp begins to flow whitish, then wholesome to nourish, what could be better — lo so it smacks to my tastelessness, though, going only on the quality of the swallow: at first flecked with pebbles, shot through with gritgravel, then lukewarm this nectar, an alb ambrosially smooth; I guess what I’m saying is, yum. I pinch the nipple, flick it and flex, lying flat on my stomach to flail my shoes down the hill. A crop of boulders surround, a ringing that might only be pimples as if this nipple’s goosed flesh, horripilation of sorts, but it’s not — they’re stray ordnance, gyres of shrapnel and frag weathered idolatrously into the forms of stray heads without feature: the senseless halo of my sink.
The milk begins to redden me rosy, it honeys, it makes me, remade. Remember your pity as the lowerlip of indulgence, from my mother I only knew of such suck for a week. I feast, dribble lust from my lips, smack and stump, suckling beyond my fill or any, to bulging, to bust…and so intently that I don’t register the slight welling, an intolerance flaringup in pricked, pinching swells, lactose, lactarded pains, not yet worrying me, though they should, so fitfully nervous soon shaking my tract. Warning of hurt, of bloating, and cramps, of gaseousness but it’s more, it’s larger than that and any ignominious lack of an enzyme. It’s that the symptoms themselves surge, egoistically huge. Limbs marbled. Until it’s milk and milk only that’s the flow through my veins, the stuff by which bones are made strong for the strain. Within this strange cradle I feel like the only babe upon earth, slurping at final immeasurable squirts until the nipple gives guzzle no longer. One last spurt, then a drizzle absorbed into the skin I’ve been warming — with beard, with handstroke, my face brought close to snuggle, to cuddle with breath…the last drop dripping to the rim of the ice, and freezing there, as a harder, barer, crueler whiteness — lavan, lavana. With the world entire beneath me, below, left deflated, a teat sucked wrinkled and dry, this mammary spent, crumpled thanks craven, hollowedout, as if for the discard.
