How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning: Fiction by Delaney Nolan

Guernica magazine’s new issue on erotic fiction, guest-edited by Roxanne Gay, features a story by sometimes New Orleans resident Delaney Nolan, who is currently in Istanbul but will be headed to Iceland shortly. Nolan’s forthcoming chapbook, Louisiana Maps, is the winner of the 2012 Ropewalk Press Fiction Editor’s Chapbook Prize.

How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning
By Delaney Nolan

Because he always running around with his pants flung off slobbering toward my apple-thighs and me saying slow down, honey, I see you. You running and I read you. Put your ankles over your own goddamn head. Because what am I, some kind of hooked meat, some Japanese bird made for bending?

Six feet tall and arms like bundled wire. He go strutting the length of the house. Bottle cap pried up with his long bad teeth, spitting tin and blood in the trashcan and turning to put that sweet mouth on me, saying, Heart, come closer. Come here. Loving in your wolfish, in your wicked.

I’ve known you and known you and known you. For always all cramped up in your bedroom like little. See this: this marks the sixteenth August what you told me it’s too toxic to go outside.

This late in summer, you always say, Is when the marsh fungus gets hot enough to kill.

It’s so hot and humid, understand, that it sends up spores. You know what spores is? Like sperm from plants, see. And it kills human beings. But only when it’s hot enough. And now it’s hot enough…

Read the full text of “I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning” at Guernica.