98 Wounds by Justin Chin

peaches. It is nothing like sucking even as the prominent verb/ continuous tense of its namesake suggest. Suck: To draw into the mouth by inhaling; to draw from in this manner; to draw in by or as if by suction; to suckle. In my youth, terrified by the crudeness and suggestiveness of language, we called it “eating ice cream.” But it is nothing like eating ice cream at all. It is nothing like breathing, it is nothing like art. It is its own act, its own tense, transitive verb, noun, dangling pronoun. Oh, how it dangles. It is its own universe, not made of atoms but of stories, so many stories you wish you were deaf. The Cock of Love. Once, I considered pulling all my teeth out. I had met a man who promised me nothing but load after load of jism from his beautiful cock and I had partaken of it enough to believe him, it was his suggestion. The gum job, the selling point men who have gotten so decrepit that that’s the best they can offer on phone-sex lines, sight unseen, all that’s known is a mouth, void of teeth, just a fleshy wet slobber to face-fuck. I chickened out at the last minute. Or maybe I was never going to do it anyway. More likely, I couldn’t make the sacrifice of having a wound in my face, unable to suck cock for weeks while it healed. “Sucking cock has nothing to do with monogamy,” I recall being told and I got on my knees in the backroom of another bar and I never ever saw that man again. It is no loss. Not yet. The Cock of First Offense. There are two kinds of hell. One is an icy world where sinners are lodged in a lake of ice, their heads two-thirds popped out of the glassy sheet, mouths trapped beneath the frozen solidity, the air dry as meat lockers. In the other, the more common version, hell is the fire and brimstone land that children are told they will be sent to if they misbehave, don’t obey, or tell family secrets. Here, demons rip out the glutton’s bowels and drape their intestines on pine trees that are on fire. Liars are fed hot coals. Idolaters have their eyes poked out with blunt pencils. Those who love gossip have their eardrums perforated with biting insects. We’re told it is the hottest place that anyone will ever experience. The hell you want to go to, though, is that place somewhere between the two hells. Here, there is no sand, as all the sand has melted into glass. But unlike the fiery hell where sand melted into glass remains in liquid puddles collected on the floor like clogged storm drains in the Mission, rank and foul-smelling, floating with the flotsam of discarded memories, the melted sand in this place turns into a sparkling expanse of glass that you may walk on. It is like walking on an eternal sheet of shattered windscreens, cracked, shattered as an exquisite spider web but still holding to each chip, smooth as the underbelly of lizards, the size of the desert. The fierce light from the Fiery Hell and the coldest intense light from the Ice Hell light this place and the waves of light sneak through the cracks in the glass and make it radiate into a quintillion spray of light. It is a hell worth going to. The Cock of Heaven & Earth. Someone’s beeper goes off, someone is chatting to another in the background, someone is preparing for another shot, someone pops open a canned drink, someone can’t get hard, someone has the cold flaccidity of a tweaker, someone I recognize, someone has brought a friend, someone is being reacquainted, someone has a new piercing, someone has a fever, someone has strange bumps on his cockhead, someone is severely deformed. This is democracy in action. I take it all. I accept it all. I accept them all. Like a mother of a nation, I hold them all dear to me. Here on my knees, in this alley, this basement let-in with this blindfold in place, here at the wee hours of a new dawn, week after week, month into years, I am queen, and I will rule here forever and ever. Watch my coronation, watch me ascend the