Archives :: Jalina Mhyana
Camper Van Girls
Appeared in the Winter 2005 issue.
She’s there every night outside Ramstein Air Base, on the driver’s
side with the interior light on, waving to every car passing by.
She’s eerily automated, programmed to smile and nod to us
while reapplying make-up in the rear view mirror.
Who stops here with a fistful of euros, watching her spray the last man
from her skin? I want to be the one knocking, the one on top, in back of the van.
My friends have done this in Korea and Thailand, where fifty bucks
buys you a lover who doesn’t speak English, who cleans your house
and cooks for you. Where is the twenty year old boy with soft
skin I can buy, where is he, and could I do it, knowing it was a chore
for him, could I bypass the female urge to please, make myself
the center of his universe, forget that he’s on the clock?
Women don’t do this, it’s ghastly and unbecoming, it’s uncompassionate
yet it might be liberating, like the massage I had in Roppongi with the
girl suspended from the ceiling who let her bare thighs split
on my back, and I felt her naked sex on me, and how she kept
twisting my nipples and smiling and asking if I’d like to keep
going, we were oily and she was petting me, petting my breasts
but I was nervous, I grabbed my friend from the waiting room
and talked all day about her squeezing my nipples and what would
have happened if I had paid the 4,000 yen I wonder, because maybe
one day I will. Maybe I’d like to buy it, so it’s really mine,
that I would own a whole person for an hour and I could fantasize
we’re in love, desperately—all those pretty things women must
believe and if there was a young guy sitting in that camper van
waving to me, I would slow the car, drive laps around him, dream.
View bio information and additional poems published in Half Drunk Muse on the author's main archive page.
Copyright 1999-2008 Jalina Mhyana.