letter from a porn actress to her viewer

By Emma Read

dear viewer,

I am tired of the camera’s overhead drool and the fake white
blare of the spotlights,

dear viewer,

I feel your eyes like flies on a disaster site, kissing the prey’s
wet pulp,

dear viewer,

are you hungry for the glamor and thrill? do you crave the
sweet allure, the sparkled magic, the enchanted obscenity ?

dear viewer,

do you imagine this to be a luxury — to be young and pink
and bare and filled? to be soft like an
abscess swollen over the weight of a hundred thousand
eggs? to be cleaved open like the
world’s first entry wound?

dear viewer,

attention demands constant performance, the glitz burns on
the tongue,

dear viewer,

I live on ridges between crisis and boredom. I forget
everything immediately after it’s over,

dear viewer,

my schizophrenic mother had herself hospitalized again, she
tried to jump out of her third story
window in a mystic frenzy of nerve ending.

dear viewer,

I was too young to speak much when I first became used, my
dad’s boiled and pitted little fruit treat, his teething and wailing
dessert, he locked my older sister in the closet to stop her from
protecting me. when I looked at her knuckles after he let her go,
they were scabbed and bloody because she knocked so hard to be
let out. her voice had rasped over after she screamed so hard for
me.

dear viewer,

I no longer speak to her.

dear viewer,

I miss her.

dear viewer,

I sometimes think of this while you watch me on the screen,

dear viewer,

in the violent excitement, the restless haze, the ecstatic
trance, sensation will only extend so far
before the snap

dislocated at the inflection point of selfhood and
deprivation, all feelings are seized
action is over

dear viewer,

are you ready to repeat the drill of your life?