An Open Letter to My Nipples

BY CHLOÉ ROSSETTI

*The author wishes to express this content warning: sexual assault, and child sexuality.*

This essay is part of Enough Enough Anthology, a project by Lexie Bean for trans and non-binary survivors of sexual assault/domestic violence to write letters to their body parts. Submissions are open until August 1st. 

The anthology will be published in book form with Jessica Kingsley Publishers in spring 2018.

I

FIXATION

    Nipples, I think about you constantly.

II

THE LET DOWN

    let down n. The release of milk in a nursing mother or lactating animal

I had another top surgery dream last night.

In this vision, a group of friends and I had all traveled en masse to a far-off, tropical locale—not the usual Florida; maybe New Orleans?—to support a friend’s top surgery. It was humid; frangipani air hung on the body. It felt magical.

The friend was laid out on a white sheet, unconscious in a way that seemed more like they were having a very sweet dream. We were all sitting in a circle in the open air around this friend while the surgeon performed the deed. We were holding sacred space; chanting; praying; smiling; singing.

The surgeon, who was genderless, also felt like a spiritual practitioner, as surgeons sometimes do. The way that they performed the top surgery was so gentle and noninvasive that the scars were barely visible afterward, and the nipples, maintaining their sensitivity, didn’t have to be moved.

Everybody hung out afterwards, and there was food and costumes and dancing; it felt like a Mardi Gras, perhaps like the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras of my Australian adolescence.

It was dusk. People were drunk. There were fireflies.

I saw my former roommate there.

“I had another top surgery dream last night,” I admitted.

He smiled at me.

This is a very sweet top surgery dream, I think. Usually, when I have top surgery dreams I am trying to breastfeed, but all I have are drainage pumps full of milk.

I really, really want to breastfeed.

Sometimes, when my partner sucks on you the way he does—gorgeous, sensuous, feminist—I feel like I want him to keep doing it until milk, laced with oxytocin, springs from you into his mouth. Then he and I will be bonded: like mother and child, like kin, like lovers. This is not shameful to me. I am kinky and I have many kinks. But I’ve thought about it a lot, Nipples, and wanting to nurse is not my kink. If anything, it is my recovery.

    let down n. A decrease in size, volume, or force

    My first boyfriend and I, and you, were 16 when we started dating. He was my first kiss. None of us had made it past first base before. You and I hadn’t even made it to a base before.

    He was obsessed with sucking on you; remember? He started doing it a month after we started dating—without asking. We would make out, and then he would almost immediately lift up my shirt and start sucking, like I were a soda machine at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I felt sick, dead.

    This wasn’t meant to be your introduction to pleasure, Nipples.

    Once I remember him doing it in public, at night, walking down a suburban street to his house. We were making out, giggling, frolicking. Then he stopped me, lifted up my shift and bra, and, to quote Bikini Kill, sucked my left one. Do you remember that?

    Do you remember the things that happen to you?

My left breast was, and still is, smaller than the right one. I remember when, noticing this while sucking away at you, he looked up and said to me, “This one just needs a little more encouragement” and sucked on that one for longer.

I withered inside and stayed small, Nipples.

    I remember when we were 17 and away at a junior national fencing competition, reuniting and reveling with teen fencers from around the country. I was hooking up with a hot female friend in front of my ex and his friend. It was for us, not them. They were just there. My ex toasted over us—as in pretended to have a glass of alcohol, or perhaps did have a glass of alcohol, and made a toasting gesture, verbally admiring the view with his friend. Something along the lines of “We’ve got booze, we’ve got a view…”

    I blocked them out of my hazy, drunken mind. I was busy. My hot friend was giving me head. It was none of their business.

    My ex’s friend moved over to me and saw that you were exposed, erect.

    He sucked on you. He did not ask me.

    The next day, I told some friends. They laughed at me.

let down n. A disappointment or a feeling of disappointment

    There was a woman I was in love with in my high school friend circle. We hooked up a couple of times back then. We haven’t spoken in years, not since she moved to the east coast of Australia, leaving her history with all of us behind.

In her later teens she behaviorally fled her Christian fundamentalist upbringing and troubled familial support system, spiraling out into drugs and unsafe promiscuity. She lied a lot. She clung to her arms in her sleep until she bruised. She fucked my boyfriend/ex-boyfriend. She hooked up with my crush in his bed while I was in the next room, unaware and still hopeful. When I moved to the States for college she moved in with my ex, or so I heard years later, and they told everybody that they were in love. And then she moved to the other side of the country to rejoin her family and religion, getting married to a guy who sexually assaulted her.

They have a baby now. Are they happy?

    I loved sucking this woman’s nipples.

    One time, she stood over me and lifted up her white singlet halfway, exposing the bottoms of her breasts. She posed for me, tugging on her cap and miniskirt, thrusting out her hip: a slutty cheerleader. I lifted up her shirt and starting sucking. I didn’t ask her.

    Another time, at a family-and-friends-type party at her parents’ house, she had a panic attack. I followed her upstairs to comfort her. She told me that her father, who always unsettled me, had been sexually assaulting her. I had many questions I didn’t ask.

    This scared me out of my queerness for almost a decade.

    I still have a great sexual appetite for people with breasts, though I rarely act on it now. I theorize that I am still too wounded from what went on before. That’s part of it, I’m sure. Mostly, though, I’m afraid to violate the breast-havers with my desires.

    I play it in my head, over and over: I see my lover’s breasts and grab them with my taking-hands, letting all the toxic masculinity deposited onto—into—me by so many bodies ooze out at once. My lover withers, as I did, becoming distorted and fixated too.

    Maybe I was always destined to be a breast- and nipple-lover.

    I drank so much breast milk from my mother that she had to pull me off her, lest I sucked her dry.

    One time, when I was less than two years old, we were in the bath with her. You were tiny back then. I twisted my mother’s huge nipples and cried out: “Pretty buttons!”

    My first crush was Jessica Rabbit. I would stare at her breasts and get hot between my legs. I was three. I rewatched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? until I wore out the VHS.

    As soon as I learned to draw, I would draw Disney-princess-type women in princess-cut dresses with Jessica Rabbit proportions: enormous breasts, tapered waists, blue eyes, blonde hair, massive lips, long lashes. I was an overweight “wog” girl—frizzy brown hair, big nose, double chin—and half a boy inside.

    I wanted to be Princess Jasmine. I wanted to fuck Princess Jasmine. I wanted Aladdin to fuck me. I wanted to be Aladdin.

    When I was seven, my friend came over and taught me how to make my Barbies make out with each other, topless, undressing each other with their plastic knife-hands—clothes getting stuck on right-angle arms—and fondling each other’s nippleless breasts.

    Later in the scene, I made a Ken doll assault a Barbie, and then I made Barbie take Ken to court for sexual harassment. I made my friend do Barbie’s voice in the courtroom. I fed her the lines. My friend didn’t want to. She was seven too.

When I was ten I saw a dance performance with my family: a dark-haired man and a blonde, statuesque woman were doing the tango. The woman looked like Barbie. The man dipped the woman and lifted her back up; she kissed him passionately, grabbing his face with both hands. I wanted the woman to kiss me. I wanted to be the man.

III

MAGIC

    Recently, a new lover fucked me without asking me. We were in bed together. Things escalated. I couldn’t find my “No.” I cried the next day. He listened.

    Before the fucking, this person told me that my breasts were “magic,” because he sucked on you, Nipples, and I had an orgasm.

    I’m still amazed by your superpower. You give me orgasms. Nipplegasms.

    And you know what? My breasts are magic. Pendulous, soft, and creased with colorless stretch marks, with huge alveoli and a hair or two around the edge. They hang heavy, and taper beautifully into the soft points of you. They are gorgeous. You are gorgeous, and you are highly responsive. You give me orgasms. You are magic.

IV

DESIRE

    This was what I masturbated to as a horny sixteen-year-old with a nipple fixation:

    Fantasy #1: Coming into my hot 34-year-old high school teacher’s office and begging for an A. Opening my uniform (a colonial-chic navy Aboriginal-print dress with a tie) to reveal my pert teenage breasts. We make out. I put his hand on my right breast and he fondles me. I guide his head toward you, Nipples, and he sucks on you. Then the principal is about to come into his office. I hide under his desk, which has an opening for legs but is opaque otherwise. He sits at his desk, hiding me from the open side, and bids the Principal enter. I unzip his fly and suck his dick to climax while he speaks with the principal, barely stifling his pleasure. I greedily suck his semen down.

    Semen is a bit like breast milk, don’t you think?

    Fantasy #2: I am a journalist covering an event at the Playboy mansion. I have on a black pencil skirt with matching garter stockings and pointy black pumps. My white sheer blouse reveals a sexy black bra, with matching high-cut, black lacy underwear.

    The Playboy bunnies are wearing outfits that look like black bathing suits with holes to let their gravity-defying breasts poke through. The holes and edges of the suits are laced with white doily fabric. They look like French maid bunnies.

    One of the bunnies is assigned to me as a tour guide. She is sexy, and looks like a cast member of Baywatch. I take a tour of the mansion and grounds. Finally, I am led through a series of underwater grottos. We pass another Playboy bunny straddling a man, squatting on his dick and riding him wildly and he lay flat on his back, receiving, helpless to her desire. They are both fully clothed except for his dick and her breasts and cunt. The bunny suit has another hole, it seems. They moan and scream with nasty, opulent pleasure, fucking away in that damp, gray grotto on the cold, stone ground, splayed out next to a shimmering swimming pool bathed in light from a skylight overhead. My bunny leads me nonchalantly past them, shooting me a coy glance as I stare. In the next grotto, a tall waterfall tumbles lustily into a lagoon. My bunny asks me if I’ve seen enough, if there’s anything more that I’ll be wanting from her. Am I interested in what I saw? Curious? She takes me behind the waterfall so that nobody can see. She is soaking wet. She puts my face onto her breast to suck. I suck her nipples. Then she sucks mine: you.

    I am masturbating and touching, pinching, twisting you as I write this.

V

REMOVAL

    My obsession with breast removal, breast sucking, and breastfeeding are all parallel, as in they do not touch.

I remember a sixth-grade classmate giving a speech about Amazon women and how they cut off their left breasts. I was eleven. I returned to this image for a long time. I later learned that it was to better shoot with a bow and arrow. What about the lefties?

    One time in eighth grade: I was rifling through a glossy magazine, and I saw a slender, modelesque woman with buzzed blonde hair and almost no makeup, wearing a singlet that clearly showed a flat chest. The caption read that she didn’t want her breasts anymore, so she removed them. I wonder where this person is now. Who is she? Is she trans? Was this article woefully gender incompetent, or did she still use she/her pronouns at the time of her surgery? Why did I fixate on this image for so long?

    For years after my experiences with my first boyfriend, I saw and felt dark energy in my right breast, the larger one. The one that needed less “encouragement.”

    My first energy healer told me that I needed to sort out my relationship with my breasts. She saw the dark energy too. She saw that I sometimes wanted them gone.

    My transmasc friends tell me that one can lose sensation in one’s nipples after top surgery. This prospect horrifies me.

Once, when I was 20, I cried about not being a man. I was in the arms of my gay male friend, in college, in bed. It was late. He kissed me. I cried some more. Then I got up and put on mascara. Or was the mascara another time?

    One of my greatest sexual appetites is for queer men who fuck other queer men. They don’t see the queer man in me.

    I met a beautiful 53-year-old transman last year. He was a radical faerie, and had transitioned seven years ago. He had always been butch, and was always attracted to queer and gay men. He had sex with men before his transition but “it never felt right.” Now it feels right. He told me that he underwent the physical transformation so that people would see him for who he was, so that he could have sex with the people to whom he was attracted. It wasn’t as much for himself, I don’t think.

    I highly identify with this story.

    Maybe when I am middle-aged, and done breastfeeding, I will transform into a queer man and have sex with the faeries for the rest of my life.

VI

HYBRID

    I have worked with the same energy healer for the past five years now. Her name is Eva. Many miracles, too many to name here, have occurred as a result of my work with her. One stands out: The dark energy is gone from my breasts now. I am very kind to them. I am still confused by them, sometimes, by their existence on my chest, but I accept their presence in my life as long as they are there. You will always be there, Nipples.

    Eva helped me recover my gender too. I am a hybrid.

    Like the car; like a mule; like an orchid.

---

Chloé Rossetti is an artist, writer, performer, energy healer, and maternal pantheist based in Brooklyn, NY. Founder of Radical Nourishment, their work focuses on the intersection of ecology, collectivism, agency, ecofeminism, pleasure, sensuality, social integration, decolonization, and love. They implore anyone looking for companionship as they rewild their lifeway, especially in the urban environment, to get in touch with them.

A Spell for Household Blessings: From Black Moon to Snow Moon

BY ANDREA LAMBERT

October 1, 2016. Full moon in libra. The Black Moon. The Blood Moon. I turn forty. Face eviction from my Hollywood dream apartment. Cry in a ball on the shower floor. Cockroaches crawl down the walls.

That black moon is the beginning of a transformative journey from Los Angeles to Reno. Beckoned ever onward by the Knight of Wands. I draw this card over and over in Tarot that four months in transition in my last living grandmother’s basement. The Knight of Wands means change in residence. Flight into the unknown. Once feared, now I embrace it.

February 1, 2017 is the witches sabbath Imbolc. I do a PTSD healing ritual clutching my broom on the fold-out bed. February 10 is the full moon, a Snow Moon in libra. Snow shrouds Nevada as I pack. I move into the House of the Rising Sun two days after Valentine's Day. Reno is my Valentine. I'm Nevada’s sweetheart. I give my grandma a red heart-shaped box of chocolates as a Valentine’s farewell.

My first week in the house, I feel spooky. Go to the secret room at the end of the hall as if called there. Turn on my dead grandma’s lamp on the hardwood floor. Pink watercolor flowers on porcelain. My great-aunt Theda Butcher was the first widow to "live out her days in the House of the Rising Sun," as the song goes. Grandma Janet was the next. I am the third.

I listen to Yoko Ono’s "Yes, I’m a Witch," as I dress for magic. The chorus goes: "Yes, I’m a witch. I’m a bitch. Don’t care what you say. My voice is real. My voice is truth. Don’t fit anyways. I’m not gonna die for you. You might as well face the truth. I’m gonna stick around for quite awhile." I plan on sticking around. Suicide has never been in my cards. Rising guitars strum as Yoko chants, "Witch… Bitch…"

I line my eyes black. Smear myself with coconut oil. Spritz Elizabeth and James "Nirvana." Pull on the black velvet Courtney Love dress with white lace collar that belonged to my dead wife. Katie Jacobson committed suicide in 2012. Her funeral portrait sits larger than life with a white and gold frame against the wall. My Wicca altar is backed with her portrait staring with those piercing green eyes right through me. I pray to her spirit for guidance. Put on a crow skull necklace from Necromance on Melrose. An etsy witch hat festooned with pale yellow gauze and jeweled black feathers.

Courtesy of Andrea Lambert

I light Sandalwood incense. Pull cards from the Dame Darcy Mermaid Tarot deck. The High Priestess. Empress. Queen of Pentacles. Queen of Cups. Strong, solitary, splendid women. I place them at the back of the altar against Halloween skull goblets and a Virgin de Guadalupe candle. Set the Hermit against a St. Martin de Porres candle for the divine masculine.

The Queen of Swords means a widow or woman of sorrow who once knew much pleasure.

Dame Darcy illustrates this Tarot card with a beautiful female face. Tears stream down her high cheekbones like Nico from the Velvet Underground. A sword tangles in her long blonde hair. I place my central queen in front of the altar stone.

On the stone, a circle of severed acrylic nails surrounds a cauldron holding a round black 8 Ball. I set the Ace of Cups and Ace of Pentacles on either side for prosperity and abundance overflowing. On the Ace of Cups water flows out of a chambered Nautilus shell into the ocean.

Surrounding the Queen of Swords I place the Ten of Pentacles and Four of Wands for a happy ancestral home. The Four of Wands is reversed for my desired home’s twist from the white picket fence of standard domesticity. Fate decrees I be alone. No children or family here. My womb is as barren as the winter branches of the cherry tree in the backyard. I seek only solitary creative bliss under the waning Snow Moon. Over the years to come as Strawberry Moons wax and wane above to Harvest Moons.

I sweep the spooky room with a besom broom. Sit in the lotus position on white velvet pillows. Holding a white candle North in my palm, I Invoke light and earth. Lift the candle East for air. South for fire. West for water. Ring the bell three times. Raise my hands on either side in mystical gestures. Left in the Lotus cup of Persephone. Right in the Devil’s Horns of Dionysus. Divine feminine and masculine.

I say, "I call upon the Goddess and God, Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, to guide this ritual and guard this home." I close my eyes. Fill my mind with white light. Reach the still point within my soul. Feel the light well upwards and outward from my heart center to fill the house.

"There is one Power, which is within and without," I say, "As I will, so mote it be: I desire that this home be blessed. Consecrated. Protected. Mine. As I will, so may it be." I light the sage. It smolders. I walk around tracing the perimeter of the house leaving smudge smoke behind. Painted faces of people I once knew in Los Angeles and San Francisco stare down from dark walls.

I look deep into the oculus of the Queen Anne dresser in the bedroom. My grandmother Janet Lambert brushed her blonde curls standing right here, many years before. I raise both hands. Left with sage giving off scented smoke. Right in gesture of the Horned God.

"Thank you for my healing," I say. "I call upon the blessed spirits of Theda Butcher, Janet Lambert and Katie Jacobson. Three strong women whom I love. Three ghosts bring about three wishes. Let this House of the Rising Sun be consecrated. Protected. Mine. From this ancestral mirror bring forth into life."

I read from Aoumiel’s Green Witchcraft: "Love is the law, and love is the bond. Merry did I meet, merry do I part, and merry will I meet again. Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again! The circle is now cleared. So may it be. Beings and powers of the visible and invisible, depart in peace! You aid in my work, whisper in my mind, and bless me from the Otherworld, and there is harmony between us. My blessings take with you. The circle is now cleared. So may it be!"

I run the smoldering sage under cold water in the bathroom to put it out safely. With beloved spirits of the other world, my spell is cast. My home is consecrated. My new life begins.

---

Andrea Lambert wrote Jet Set Desolate (Future Fiction London: 2009), Lorazepam & the Valley of Skin: Extrapolations on Los Angeles (valeveil: 2009) and the chapbook G(u)ilt (Lost Angelene, 2011). Her writing appears in 3:AM Magazine, Fanzine, Entropy, Angel’s Flight Literary West, HTMLGiant, Queer Mental Health and elsewhere. Her work is anthologized in Haunting Muses, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, The L.A. Telephone Book Vol. 1, 2011-2012, Off the Rocks Volume #16: An Anthology of GLBT Writing and elsewhere. Lambert paints in figurative mixed media oils critically referenced as “kitchy maximalism.” Her artwork features in Angel’s Flight Literary West, Entropy, Hinchas de Poesias, Queer Mental Health and Anodyne Magazine. CalArts MFA.