The Ocean waves its greetings to the Shore,
gently tickling the tips of his sand with
her wet fingers

she sighs at the contact
breathing in before heaving back
in sweet repetition
this brazen exchange

The Holy Ones


I want to shove socks in my pants, so it looks like I have one of those Italian-line painting *****. I want to do it when I go to the grocery store so fourteen-year olds and thirty-year olds alike stare at my junk as it fills the stitches of my pelvic arena, I want to make eye contact with mothers and grandmothers, brothers and dads as they shift uncomfortably in those handicap battery powered carts that are reserved for the handicapped but are often only used by the near-morbidly obese, near because they’re not quite dead yet, morbid because they can’t help but imagining my **** sliding past their tongue and what it feels like as the tip pushes past their uvula and they gasp for air through their nose because they’ve never had a **** like this in their mouth before. This would be my **** ****. This would have me making lists of adult film star names for film star jobs I’d never take because I’d be busy making lists of phone numbers, the college girls I’d have my pick of *******, and the mothers and grandmothers who I’d be happily turning away from while I select my own organic radishes from the produce department at the specialty market on Vine. This **** is better than a rolled up wrapped stack of hundreds or the leather jacket I had in high school, it’d be better than when I walked down Michigan Ave in Umbro Valentino donning a Parisian accent, I can see me having to buy new briefs just to make room for this ****. And my own **** getting jealous of the girth I’d be faking it’d swell up, and in the middle of ordering my four-pump Vanilla Almond milk Latte from Starbucks my gray wool socks would fall to the floor, and up from the band of my Acne Jeans would bulge the tip, just the tip, like she said when I was in college, or just the tip like I said when I just needed to feel something other than how emotionally wrecked you made me feel when you told me not to touch you anymore. You ****** me up righteously. And still, 380 women later, I’m ****** up and I don’t have a single pair of socks to wear

Garden Parkway YMCA
Dallas, Texas
22 November 1963

Darling Sophie,

Could it be only two months since I let your fingers slip from my hand as that train departed Voronezh station? I fear that this trip was a great mistake. . . .

The boat sailed from Sevastopol as scheduled. Just two days and we were through the Bosporus/Dardanelles and into the incredibly blue Aegean and the Mediterranean. On September 27 we passed Gibraltar and started the long haul across the Atlantic. The work was not demanding though the ship was quite ***** and not really very pleasant.

We docked at Houston in the state of Texas on October 9. Defecting was surprisingly easy. There was supposed to be work in Dallas so I walked/hitch-hiked here last month. But I have not been able to find any work.

The people here, though friendly, are coarse and brash. The stores overflow with televisions, record players, mink coats, but there are many very poor people here too...

The great American leader, Kennedy, was shot and killed today, driving in his open-topped car along the streets of this very city.

My money is gone; my strength, exhausted. How blithely I left you and Russia behind! I feel my lips brushing the tiny hairs on the back of your neck, your ******* swelling. . . . Sophie! May you know great happiness and love! I only ask that in the spring when you visit Krymskaya Pond, that you remember how we knelt there, how I whispered in your ear there, when the air is filled with the scent of its cherry trees that you remember what we felt there. . . .

  Yours, always,    Nickolay