Sex, Kink, and the Erotic: “Bodied Canvas” by Victoria Buitron
Bodied Canvas
I suggested he carve us—wrapped lotus position in black walnut wood—chiseling and striking, chips of husk falling on the floor until the areolas rose from my breasts. Torsos with no heads, our thirst only visible with the curve of his fingers, with the arch of my wooden back. We didn’t have to tell anyone it was us, just place the sculpture near the living room’s fireplace and watch flames dance on our bark flesh. But he wanted us to bind ourselves to the art, together.
How about something like Wim Delvoye’s X-Ray blowjobs?
We could make our own scenes to show the rhythm of our motions through wavelengths. Place the photographs in the guest room and wonder in whispers whether it creeped visitors out or turned them on.
But a machine for that is hard to come by, he said.
A sex canvas then.
We’d each get three shades of what we deemed to be the color of our sex, place a sheet on the studio floor, let our bodies blend the colors until we came.
Yes, yes, he said.
I picked black, white, and magenta. He appeared with dark red, lemon, and a shade like a robin’s egg. I poured some white on his chest like hot wax, but he shivered when it pooled into his navel. Instead of clinging like syrup, the paint covered our guts like lotion. The magenta and white combined into a light pink handprint on his cheek, the shade of his lips. Dabs of cerulean followed the sweep of my neck. Canvas corners of silver smears and drips. An outline of feet sliding to a halt. Pools of black lust. The last splash from a flowing water fountain. A cherry loop on my waist that I mistook for a hickeyed stain. A grey splotch where I told him to go slower, his etched palm the color of dirt to the left. There, he obliged until I trembled.
We placed the canvas on the wall near the dining room table. We lie every time someone asks us what it is. A failed Jackson Pollock with no way to confirm whether or not it came from his hand. A five-dollar find at a Brooklyn flea market I found the day we met. A canvas born from a full moon dance to bring a drizzle of rain during a severe drought.
Mhmm, interesting, they all say.
We look at each other from across the table, hungry-eyed, placing key lime pie or mango sorbet on our tongues, eyes steady, the zest of whatever we’re eating more pungent, savoring what only we know.
About Victoria Buitron
Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Smokelong en Español, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, and other literary magazines.