Edward Salem
	Wound And Gauze The gauze went hard overnight. It went from a fresh mixture of white-plasmayellow-red to a stale purple-brown-black color scheme when I checked it again at 4 a.m. in the strong bathroom light to the sound of the prolonged hiss of Mia's ass as she urinated into the gargling toiletbowl. The fabric of the gauze curled and frayed over the underside of my wrist. Mia dabbed herself where she dripped with a single piece of toiletpaper and rose and the toilet swallowed. She pulled her grey cotton panties from her olive ankles to her olive hips. Perfect virgin beauty of their form. Grey panties over so much – supple asscheeks, pretty pubic mound, tiny jut of hips, silken olive flesh, curved line of dark crease- -  I asked if she thought I should change the gauze. Regardless, I didn't feel like it. Like changing it. I felt like fucking her but I also felt groggy from interrupted sleep. I felt like fucking her face. Ultimately I wanted to go back to sleep. The gauze or the wound smelled. They smelled strangely like gauze and a wound. I never considered that gauze or wounds have distinct smells, but the smells fit. They seemed right, warbled and jumbled silently in the nose. My nose was sort of greasy in the night from sleeping. We leak grease from our pores in our sleep I guess. I smear the grease down the brim to the bulb of my nose with my thumb which is greasy in turn. I have olive skin. I am olive-skinned. My face leaks olive oil in the night in moderation. The face paces itself or else we'd have to wash our pillowcases with increased regularity. Sleep takes me for a few minutes until waking interrupts a brief dream. Young turquoise-eyed Cleopatra is with me in my dream, shaving my olive face. Her glistening teeth come down on the crisp, honey-doused layers of a hulking piece of baklava. She feeds me baklava. I chew baklava, I wash my hands, I enjoy both animal exercises in retardation, and during the gestures of each, I try breaking them down, the movements, in halves. Eventually I'm washing my hands with my feet, I'm chewing baklava with my asshole, I'm enjoying the gestures of each. Towards the end the dream accelerated and collapsed in a final visual and sensory gush, gashes and wreckage, alternating parturition and castration scenes, human rubble. I can't stand it when I dream things about people I love that makes me sick at heart, and the feeling persists all morning and carries into the afternoon, even flickering weakly again in the night before new dreams. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin of Palestine was assassinated yesterday, and that makes me sick at heart, too. Mia turns onto her stomach in bed and unintentionally shows me her ass. Grey cottony bulge of it. I want to--  I want to- -  I wonder if there's a scenario where human oil could be turned in for a profit. Olive oil of my face. Coconut oil patchouli oil palm oil grapeseed oil motor oil eucalyptus. I want to- -  I want to *everything* to it. I open my palm, it's warm and just a little oily. I rest the warm palm on the warm bulge of her right asscheek. It feels right. She does not wake up. I give it a squeeze. Gentle, calculated, prayer of a squeeze. No reaction from her. Nothing. No. None at all. She sleeps. She excretes oil in moderation. Does her birthmark give off oil too? The skin is different, a brown island, wobbly oval, wavy-edged. Skin like nipple-skin, Aureliano's areola, like the thin, slightly darker skin on the underside of a penis, near the end, lion's-beard-like bunching of birthmark-like skin, does it give off oil? I can't sleep. I can sleep but I don't. I want to- -   Mia did not rinse her fingers after she urinated, I'm just now remembering. I look for her hands in the bedroom-darkness-of-night. I can't find them. I have a general idea where they are, but where? My eyes should have adjusted to the dark by now. I use my other senses: the wound smells; the gauze smells. It is a light but distinct, inimitable smell. It could not belong to anything else. In Plato's world of forms there is the one perfect wound and perfect form of gauze and there is the one perfect smell that belongs solely, devotedly, perfectly to the sensible marriage of gauze and wrist-wound. In this place the blood of my lightly odorous wound is a flat turquoise or teal. In this place the blood should be perfumed; the wound fragrant. I lick my wound and kiss Mia. Her warm mouth accepts the wet teal of my tongue and the kiss is good. The kiss is good because Mia's pillowy lips are moist in the human oil that secretly emerges from her pores in the night. The kiss is soft and slightly greasy and it feels right that way.