Rosa Canina
Come over to my place. Groom yourself beforehand. We don’t have to do anything. Maybe we hold each other, maybe we kiss. If it doesn’t feel right, we can stop and go for a drink.
I slide the metal gate open. You’re standing in the night-drizzle, fresh-faced, looking behind me to the door. Come in. You duck past and wait. Go in, I gesture as if casting a thread. You glide like a curtain’s folds. The bedside lamp angled to the wall lights everything in a diminishing way. Shadows possess the sheets. Okay, I close the door. You look at me. Should we sit on the bed? You sit and clear your throat. I sit too, closer to the headboard. Should we lie down? I kick off my shoes and move over. You clear your throat again as you untie your laces, then you lie next to me. Can you hug me? Immediately the warmth of your cheek against my ear, your chin on my shoulder. And the tenderness squeezes, tightening. Beneath it, your body is rigid and warm. The ribs and meat between vibrate like a pointer’s panting heart.
A ceramic bowl painted with flowers hangs from your porch. Lilac petunias grow from the bowl, water drips from the hole at the bottom. Green shade through the half-drawn curtains, and the garden in shadow. Drenched and twitching like nocturnal animals, the bushes click and rub together.
Sunlight sparks from the hosepipe cracked over the dog-fence lining the flowerbeds. The curtains stir. My desk chair reclines. Beyond the window’s burglar bars, you walk with the hosepipe’s end, feeding the bushes white-clean water. As you tend to the roses, you look to the window. My eyelids unfurl.
Television static pools blue through the room. We discuss penis size and the perception of it from above and below. I ask to see a picture as a matter of course. Insidious. I don’t ask again. But when I hear you move in your bed I imagine you move next to me. The duvet cover and blackness beyond. I imagine standing and going to your bed, bending, cupping your face in my hands. Assurance in the procedure. I had done it before with a girl. Steps to the bed heavy and impending as the sink of my lips, as if I carry the room with me, behind me, descending. And the poor thing will yield. The poor beautiful thing.
Grip the woody rose’s stem, bend before it. Hold it like a narrow shin, hard above the ankle. Hold it with both hands, forehead to its feet. Scalp into thorn. Stubble into skin.
Around the corner of the porch, near the writing table, roses are trained to the trellis and banister with plastic bags. Thorns rest in flakes of white paint, in splits in the wood. Leaves yellow. A rose wilts. I had an erotic experience with a rose in this garden. A white petal on the floor. The hosepipe twined into the body of a woman.
“My mother was a bitch,” you say.
“I can’t help but think if you were a woman I’d be more sexually attracted to you.”
You murmur sorry.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I can be a girl for you.”
“No, no… I mean if a girl was sitting where you are, a sexual dynamic would emerge. With you it’s easy to be platonic.”
“You find me hideous.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t find me attractive.”
“I didn’t say that either. You’re very handsome.” I think you’re beautiful. “I don’t know why I said that.”
Sharper desires are forbidden. Not now. Plant a kiss on a rose. Pink scalp line in blonde hair. Plant it there. It cuts inward. Longing wilts in the collapsed folds of lonely boys, idle upon their cocks. Set to consuming themselves. Pink whorls through space. Won’t somebody hold me? From the outside in. I can spiral in. Fold me into… Ants walk by the ashen rosebud on the tiles. Beneath the writing table. Warm on the tiles. I wouldn’t want to touch it. Grip the stem, kiss it. My lips bursting. I could cry. God, it feels good.
Water drips from the leaves. Dark in the flowerbeds, against the white garden wall. Pierce fingers in the soil like a spade not lifting, stop. I don’t know if you give me the filling I want.
But then I sit at the guest room’s desk and see the memory of you watering them. My shadow-mask in the window’s reflection. Burglar bars trellis restraint. I’m folding again.
Sun falls through haze. Light measured and faint as the paths of ants on sandstone tiles around the pool. Its surface crossed by the shadow of the eave. Moths like blanched petals cleave to its skin.
In the afternoon we mow the lawn. Individually we swim and sleep. The ceilings are high in this house. I touch your shoulders while you sit in my chair. My fingers go all the way in. A trace of your hair floats on the surface of foliage. The debris catches timeless light. Now a dark trace in the smoke of the clouds. You look beautiful lying there is what I should have said. The freeze when standing at the edge, where reasons lose sense, become mindless. Absolute hollowness of the next step. To cup my hand to your hair. The water goes all the way in. Deft fingers brush hair behind your ear, to the stem of your skull, drawing you near. Fear bulges beneath. Twice I look away. From your blue eyes where steady shallows carve beneath the eaves.
I look at the guest room’s ceiling after you leave. When you entered I was watching gay porn on my phone. As speculatively as straight porn. You curled on the neighbouring bed, bare soles flushed. I glanced at the long crack in the drawn curtains, the high windows. I wouldn’t get up to kiss you. Instead, a subdued conversation about wanting to nap, a declined offer of tea.
The ceilings are high and flooded with blue. One day I’m going to kiss you. It’s leaking into the garden through a split of evening window.
“No,” you stub your cigarette out and wander into the back garden. “Is this what it feels like to be one of your muses?”
“How does it feel?”
“Like I’m being violated.”
“You’ll find I’ve been quite flattering.”
You sigh, stooping to stroke your pointer.
I walk on around the house, past the porch, to the poolside table on the sandstone beneath the yellowwood. An endless thunder rolls through the grey sky. Raindrops ring the pool surface. I wait. Walking back, I notice the hosepipe left running at the base of a rosebush. Further on a young tree pruned and its cuts painted white. Blonde globes of sap seep from the cuts.
In your bedroom I stand to keep my courage. Then I sit. It takes a while to make tea. When you come in, I rise, take the cup, say, “Thank you,” in the quiet way we speak when alone. You turn, take a step. The seconds coagulate.
“Is this one of your experiments?”
“No.”
You turn.
“You have one of those faces where I can’t tell what you’re thinking.”
“It’s a glaze of fear.”
“What are you afraid of?”
I put the teacup at the foot of your bed.
“I’m afraid because I want to kiss you.”
You sit on the spare bed. Your face wilts.
“Easier telling you than ambushing you when you brought in the tea.”
“Is that what that was?”
“Yes.”
“I can feel the hairs on my face.”
I don’t like the hairs on your face.
“I can see us liking it.”
I can see us trying and saying this isn’t how I imagined it.
I feel the hairs on my face.
“This feels like high school.”
I touch your shin gently.
White impotent wood.
The pierce of the rose’s thorns (I held it again) is sweet, and I understand cutting, mutilation, and gay sex. I understand the shape of tree silhouettes and clouds on the pool’s surface. I touch their shapes with my mind. The finger of my mind is my tongue. If I want to kiss a rose in this garden, I first look to see that no one is around. I sit with my back to the garden, my face to the hedge, and in a cross-legged fold, consecrate it. Stem to navel.
Shaun Pieter Clamp is a writer and editor living in the UK. He graduated from Rhodes University with a BA in English, Philosophy and Law, and a BA(Hons) in Philosophy, for which he received the DCS Oosthuizen Prize. His writing is published in Hobart, Agbowó, La Piccioletta Barca, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.
Matt Macken (b. 1986) is a contemporary artist living and working in Leicester, UK. A self-taught painter, Macken’s process blends personal experience, memory, photographs, and spontaneous sketches, to create vibrant compositions of intimate symbolic expression. Macken’s work has been exhibited internationally in galleries across the UK, Europe, the USA, and Asia.