Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (12/02/86)
Really-From: nessus (Doug Alan) BESTIARY (by Sharon Olds) Nostrils flared, ears pricked, Gabriel asks me if people can mate with animals. I say it hardly ever happens. He frowns, fur and skin and hooves and slits and pricks and teeth and tails whirling in his brain. You *could* do it, he says, not wanting the world to be closed to him in any form. We talk about elephants and parakeets, until we are rolling on the floor, laughing like hyenas. Too late, I remember love -- I backtrack and try to slip it in, but that is not what he means. Seven years old, he is into hydraulics, pulleys, doors which fly open in the side of the body, entrances, exits. Flushed, panting, hot for physics, he thinks about lynxes, eagles, pythons, mosquitos, girls, casting a glitering eye of use over creation, wanting to know exactly how the world was made to receive him.
Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (12/09/86)
Really-From: nessus (Doug Alan) THE TAKERS (by Sharon Olds) Hitler entered Paris the way my sister entered my room at night, sat astride me, squeezed me with her knees, held her thumbnails to the skin of my wrists and peed on me, knowing Mother would never believe my story. It was very silent, her dim face above me gleaming in the shadows, the dark gold smell of urine spreading through the room, its heat boiling on my legs, my small pelvis wet. When the hissing stopped, when the hole had been scorched in my body, I lay crisp and charred with shame and felt her skin glitter in the air, her dark gold pleasure unfold as he stood over Napoleon's tomb and murmered *This is the finest moment of my life*.