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Kicking the Lust Bucket
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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53 Kicking the Lust Bucket Rising in a café in Pittsburgh, I feel a man’s eyes press into my chest as I slide an arm into my overcoat. I do not recoil from his wounded gaze, like when I was twelve hustling home, wet-haired, from swim practice, men perched on corners in tight pants, eyes rolling around in their heads, like the steel balls on roulette wheels. Cars prowling in engorged circles, thorned eyes peering through smeared windshields at my porcelain cheeks. I do not recoil from the hunger in the man’s eyes, the look that is ¾ pain and ¼ desire, like his foot 54 is clamped in a steel trap, and his eyes are begging for release. I do not judge the man his hunger, but I do not lean into it either, do not sprinkle a thimble of kerosene into his broiled heat just to watch his face flame up and flicker. I remember an old landlord in California, planting jonquils in the common soil between our doors, his sinewy, shirtless chest, tattoos roving across his skin glisten, how I tilted a hip, conjured a blush, wondered if my lip taunt made the broken glass in his loin reassemble into a bottle I might feign to sip from. I button my coat. I can’t [54.81.157.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:06 GMT) 55 help this man. Even if I bent over and wrapped my hands around his swollen purple foot and released it from that shark-jaw tension, it wouldn’t help. Lust is a bucket that never stays filled. A drop always spills, and all the bucket feels is the absence of that drop, radiating outward like the phantom throb of a permanently popping capillary. ...