Lovers Pain
by Robi Wood
Robi Wood, St. Johns, 35 mm photograph, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Lovers Pain
Robi Wood | OCT 2025 | Issue 49
“Don’t panic,” she sways to me on the dance floor. Spinning to and away. Witch hat, black dress twirled around us.
“I already did,” I whisper, breathless. “I’m going to fall in love with you.”
“Don’t you dare.”
Snow. Glass.
Hip. To touch.
We sit in the back of a black car.
New mouth. Her first time sucking the face of “another woman.” She can’t feel my gender. We don’t know each other long enough or well enough and I can’t simplify queer theory fast enough.
There isn’t time.
I pull my mouth back, “What are you thinking about?”
“All I can think about is how I’m kissing a woman. I can’t believe how good it feels to kiss a woman.”
Medieval Sciatica, from passio (“disease”) and fem_sciaticus (“sciatic corruption of women” or “of pain in the hip”) from Greek iskhias (genitive) “pain for the hips,” or “joint.” Hip without. Chronology helps no one. I can’t trace back time to origin and figure out where it all went wrong. There is no beginning.
“Where are you?”
“I’m trying to text you the graffiti I see.”
She’s drunk.
“Just tell me the streets.”
“I’m right outside the building.”
Whenever I begin to fall in love, I take on that lover’s pain. Their physical pain. It’s the healer in me, I know it, the healer of me that will one day be delivering babies or prescribing holistic medical treatment based on an astro chart and a reiki session, testing the color of the womb against the color of the tongue, etc. But I am not them yet. I am not so learned or so boundaried enough to protect myself. From pain, hers, loves. An ex-lover: You don’t have to be with them to heal them. But I don’t know this yet. And so, I take on her injuries. Latent, dormant or erupted. Inflamed. A redness of the heart. Or lungs. Kidneys. Not immediately. Not when she’s the one in need of relief. But a little bit, dashed over time. Her, invading me, me, evading my lack of sense.
She’s bent over.
I’m on an airplane.
She’s in a car.
She’s on a bus.
I’m walking the dog.
She’s walking over.
I’m on my way.
I’m not coming.
I’m not speaking to you anymore.
I don’t want to communicate with you anymore. I want to know how to love you. I want to know what beauty feels like.
Where are you?
I’ve got her talking about 9/11 and all the times she couldn’t get pregnant she’s telling me how old she is and I tell her everything with my smile she’s saying she’s given up on everything except her career her book her motherhood her partnership her education and I say well you’ve met me i’m a lighting bolt or a fire starter or a healthy heap of wood to burn.
“I want to get lost I want to be lost with you don’t you want that here I am so so inhabitable.”
Some love makes me want to roll up some love makes me want to bake and some love makes me want to starve myself.
This is the kind of language which made my years long romance with a ghost so possible. Me, loving to serve. An ex lover: You really just love a challenge. But do I? Do I know that I am allowed to have something or someone, easily? To not give up a muscle or a bone? Because I was taught from before I can remember that the things I liked were supposed to turn on me. The things I loved were fated to elude me. I must fall in love with “straight” women I must let them use me I must let them play out a hero's journey of my body until they slay the dragon for their ego. Returned. Though, not to me. I am not a man.
“If you came over I would have flowers and I would be exceptional.”
There’s a play button an inch down and two inches to the left of my belly button. It’s an organ I would know the name of if I had been a smarter scientist or a more handsome Dr or a more worthy American who knew more languages than accented English.
What language does she speak in?
Tongues and moans and “baby honey sweetheart sweetheart now now now come now come save me save me now.”
“I’m here to cook for you,” she says.
“I’m here to drink your wine and eat your face.”
“I’m old and I don’t have children,” she says, “obviously there are some issues.”
“I’ll bring your coffee to you,” I say.
I straddle her. She is face down on her bed, crying from the pain. Her legs are between my legs as I remove the heating pad from her hips and press my elbows into the acupressure points. It’s the middle of the night. Light turns in from the window. Her tears have dried film to her face. I
tell her, kneading her ass this way, all warm and round, it’s like I’m baking bread. She laughs. I spread some selfish kisses on the small of her back before I roll down her shirt and return the heat. This is the first night I sleep in her bed. Beneath the owl, wings turned, flying away.
All of her linens are white, and I am bleeding. Every other hour I wake up to quell her cries and then run to the bathroom to change my tampon. I’ve never been so scared in my entire life to bleed-through. Me, the glorified nurse, glorified not because I am being glorified, but because I love with the kind of devotion that makes people priests. And she let me bring my dog. I wake. It’s morning and she’s no longer in pain. The first night she’s been able to sleep in days. Nights. However many she says. I brought her relief. I bring her relief. I do that. I do. I want to walk the dog, I’m going to walk the dog, I say. But I want to come with you. I tell her she should rest. She argues. She says, ask me five more times. I climb on top of her. And kiss her neck with each ask. Come with us, come with me to walk the dog, please come with us, come on a walk with us.
We walk. My first Portland December. It’s cold, but I don’t remember it. There are street names but I don’t remember them. There are goats, but I don’t remember where. What I remember is kissing her cheek in the coffee shop. And her smiling, not ashamed, but proud in the small against me. I remember the toddler playing with the dog, us staring at them together. Stunned in silence. I remember seeing St. Johns Bridge for the first time, not understanding how I could’ve missed this. Where could I have been all this time. What have I been doing.
When you said you wish I was a man, was it because of my hips? When you said you were too old to have the baby you wanted, did you imagine her inside me? As we humped each-other, did you think, I’ve never felt a woman’s hip before. What is buried here? There is so much of the world I don’t know. Was it lovemaking or a game of operation. Or a game of Jenga. When did I collapse because I know when you did. When you came and the first thing you said was, you’re better than any man, what did you mean exactly?
I am not a man I am not a man I am not a man. I am everything else. I am all that water you won’t drink and all that god you don’t believe in. I am not a man, I am good for you.
Lungs hold grief. Kidneys hold bravery. Lungs are lead. Kidneys water. Water anchors the lungs. Where is my hip where are they what have I missed.
“I don’t want to have sex because what if I don’t like it? I’m not ready to not see you anymore.” She is crying.
“But what if you do like it?”
“I’m not ready for that either.”
I’m in love with you.
We barely know each other.
I’m not a man.
I was just experimenting.
“Just because I like something doesn’t mean I want to do it again. It’s just too confusing. And I can’t be confused.”
She’s lying in my arms. She’s only been asleep a few hours, even though it’s morning. I’ve gone out for coffee and bagels, even though we’re in Portland. I’m reading silently, catching moments of myself every few pages staring out over the balcony thinking: Perfect. She stirs and sighs, “read to me.” I put down the Michelle Tea memoir and pick up Eileen Myles poems. There’s a straight woman in my bed. I have a responsibility. Her first, and last time sleeping in the arms of “a woman.” I have an obligation to read her dyke poetry. What she can’t remember from my body, she’ll take from my voice. What my body cannot do, all that I can’t give her with my heart and my longing, maybe my throat can.
I am drenched inside her. She whispers, “Save me.”
I sing, “My love, I cannot.”
Robi is a genderqueer artist living at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers in St. Johns, Oregon. They are most curious about embodiment and ways we listen. Robi is a brain for hire as a research consultant as they are studying to become a psychotherapist. They are currently at work on their first dance artwork, collaborating with community to listen/move in time to theologians’ disembodied voices. A mystic, they are always talking about god, in one form or another.