Sex with a Brain Injury

I know why my friends think the sex should be the same. It’s because I look the same.

Illustration by Kyle Griggs

The best way to picture it is this: that’s my wife on our bed, and that’s a tree stump on top of her. The funny thing is she is really into the tree stump, even though the stump can’t do too much, maybe crush her with its weight.

I am trying to figure out how to move. I am above my wife, and I am stuck. I don’t know how to get myself out of this position, which looks similar to a dog when it’s raising its leg to take a piss. The problem is my brain has stopped telling me what to do. My wife touches my arm, What do you need?

The only times I’ve ever moved through holy water are on the page, on the dance floor, on the ice, and when I’m with my wife.

I used to be good at sex. This is a secret I’ve held close, but I’ll tell you now because it’s been taken from me. That’s how I caught my wife — sex and poetry, and the promise of more sex through poetry. It started in seventh grade when Sean Callahan kissed me atop the doghouse, my knees straddling his concave shoulders, and he asked, Where did you learn that, do you watch dad movies? I understood then that I had a hidden intelligence, and it had to do with attunement. From then on, I decided I was only going to share it with people I liked.

Is it really that different now? a friend asks. Listen, do you know what happens to me if I shake the orange juice too hard? Do you know what happens if I drink coffee?

When chicken is fried, the smell overpowers me for days. Fried chicken and legs in the air, fried chicken and her exposed throat. It wakes me at 2AM. It rubs itself on our bedsheets. Some nights, my mind cannot tell her skin from the chicken’s.

How do I put this? Orgasms make my head explode.

Over time, I become afraid of my head exploding. I become the dormant volcano the tiny people fear, so that I am both seething earth and the peoples’ constant terror of the next invisible tremor.

For as long as I have known lust, it is as if a boar is barreling through my body, hot breath, tusks raised. What is in me will not be quieted. Only now, sometimes my wife and I have to stop as soon as we get…