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It is not that I thirsted for Milo’s dreams I could have had better from any rice-cooker sales for kisses like maple sap But Rafu stood in the shadows of Milo’s house, wrapped in the grassy yellow-green perfu when I told her the jokes Yatsuhashi had snorted totrain I rocked on s I could be: tapir, tiger, salaryman, shadoater

I forgot to fix listen She cried in her sleep, chasing ships I wished to know nothing of, lost in her tired colonial despair

I lost weight, as lovers will do

On the seventh night I knew my Rafu, I unfolded into a silk screen with lonely tapirs drinking from a moonlit stream painted on my panels I wanted so to please her We stood side by side, saying nothing, content Delicate snow ca down the s Milo slept on her

“I can do that too,” said Rafu coquettishly, e had finished and sweat shone like water on our screens “I can fold up into a tapir, a tiger, a salaryirl”

“Show me!”

“Not yet,” she demurred

BECAUSE OF HER NAKEDNESS

“Coed ainst the dark “I have an apart over you I will show you the secret Peacocks of Right Intention, who make their nests in the Admiral’s mansion and peck at him when he orders his men to stand in ridiculous lines and speak the nonsense of demonkind He cannot see them—the poor man thinks he has eczeh the Carnival of Right Livelihood, and ill eat black sugar burnt in the Ovens of Contentht and continue your study of women—I will eat only the dreao, hoof in hinge, and in the plinking of those silver balls we alone will hear the clickingis chance”

Rafu blushed—her panels blossoh she could bleed Milo snored and turned over in her sleep, ht in her wet htly toward the woman

“No, Akakabu, passion of my elderly years! I love her I love her, and I will never leave her”

“How can you love such a thing?”

“I love her because of her nakedness, Kabu She has stood before me and peeled off all her clothes until she was utterly defenseless, her breasts and her shoulders and her lonely sex all for me, for ue pierced when she was a girl but took it out when she er than her left, that she has a birthh someone punched her, and that she has stretchhere for her to do but eat These are such precious things to know! I knew them about Chieko, and Kayo, and Masumi, and Aoi too They all showed me their bodies, and how the world stamped itself onto them I have not even seen your body the way my mistresses show me theirs She has been naked before irl to the cold”

FIRST LADIES

I aded Rafu her naked wo in lonely houses full of woreen and purple of the Peacocks of Right Intention I wanted to show my Jotai that a Baku, too, can know a human that way, and better, for no one is ever so naked as in their drealistens like sweet fat over bone