EXCESSIVE AESTHETICISM

 I really wonder why everybody wants to fondle my small breasts.  Whenever I meet someone I guess it: the hand on the fabric first, then surely on the two nipples which he alternately rolls between his fingers.  And why all this?  Why should I feel pain and turned on so often?  Any kind of music should offer a loftier and perhaps keener pleasure.  And so, almost always, I find myself the victim of these ostensibly naïve gestures, not excepting females from my experience.
 But the body of the man I loved remains my most perceptible fantasy.  He had black sleeky hairs on his legs and lying on his back he had an urge to make my chest ache.  I refused and he, immobilizing my wrists, put the whole left breast into his mouth.  He really wanted to swallow it because at one point in my painful pleasure I felt his teeth on the raw surface.
 Then came the mutual recollection from a painting by a medieval young man: Nausicaa gazing at her departing lover, after he had eyed her knees, and again this very same painter renascent in the Renaissance making out in my dream with my girlfriend – dead now.  What airs, what hunger in the age of donkeys – I never felt afraid of languid superstitions for they, digging the smallest pit, had promised the ultimate love.  I only severed their fingers in retribution for their harshness.  Then, phantoms sought to suck the milk from my breasts.  They moaned to the strains of La Gioconda and when Ponchielli lost his temper they commended their souls to the devil, doubly hurt by the game.

VERONIKI DALAKOURA
Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas