speed_of_healing steel flower girl #2 man at the bar calls out derisively to the lone woman dancing. eyes shut, she winds, twirls, unwinds. her legs are rhythmic capillaries pulling notes up from the reverberating floor into shifting knees, gliding hips. her movement is a fluid fortress. I wonder where she learned to ignore him. I wonder how her mind came to be swaddled safe in her bones. no self-conscious slope to her neck. no reflexive cringe in her shoulders no bodily apology for the swinging arc she traces. mind and body— my own primal twins long cleft by glancing fists and pummeling eyes. my movement, the furtive twitching of a hare. body rigid, abandoned, forlorn. mind taut, expectant and hovering. wary, fumbling strangers they circle, lusting. elusive, their union thwarts the well-intentioned advice, voices clicking like a metronome: "try this, try that." the corrective hands of the Tai Chi master, who touches without permission. yet I sense their mutual approach in the sound of my own throat loosening around a warbling note in the deep breaths I carve from myself at the edge of sleep in the prick of the acupuncturist's needle: pulsing chi rushes to steel— a flicker of the craving that must be fulfilled. 031117 ... marked . 031118 ... . absolutely gorgeous. love's_secret_domain 031118 ... egger . 040203 ... . . 050518 what's it to you? who go blather from