WRESTLING ELEPHANTS

By Jamie Brisick

ANOTHER BEING ENTIRELY

“Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs? Would it make any difference to you if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of in me?”

—J.M. Coetzee, Waiting For The Barbarians

March 14, 2011