Persephone

When I Bury My Face in the Crimson Velvet

119 When I Bury My Face in the Crimson Velvet It’s not just the faint musk or rose or how my skin smelled, moving against another body but a xerox of a xerox of a strange woman’s sweat, some where in a shadowy room in a basement in China, bent over these sleeves, pressing and smoothing the seams as if the blood cloth was the corpse of the baby daughter she never held. Her husband took the baby, it was the rule: one only and they needed a son. He was already half crippled, bent into himself as if he’d prayed 3/4th of his life in the rice fields. She didn’t ask when he came back, his arms empty, just shook his head. From then on, they rarely said anything to each other. But in her dreams she hears her little orchid gasp and cry, sees the perfect fingers reaching for her. The velvet is softer than anything 120 else she can touch. How could it matter that like everything she loved to hold and press into her lips, her body, she can’t once she’s made it, keep ...