Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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This is a story/poem that addresses the question that I get asked a lot particularly by drunk people, "do you have sex in your wheelchair?"

It’s also about saying goodbye to my old wheelchair and welcoming in the new one.

This one looks just like my old one.
In 5years the manufacturers can offer me
nothing new, no new inventions,
just a $3000 price increase. So I look for the things
that make her different-yes, she is a her,
who may become a him,
or float in-between in a gender-bending land.

I am levitating off the ground.
I move this way.
I feel the speed of a hill and its slow climb,
the vibration of every bump, the lean of a gutter.
Smooth new rims under my fingertips.
She is so new, I am the first to touch her,
to know this feeling. Only another who lives
within their chair can know the joy
of feeling an unmarked wheel rim.
Sensitive fingertips come to know its dents, its scratches,
they tell of our times together. Like the time
me and my best friend were too busy laughing
so hard while crossing the road that she pushed me
into the curb and scratched you all along your side;
marking you with our laughter.

Or the hot summers spent sweating on you,
body sticky and muscles sore from wheeling up hills.
Or your front wheel that would stick in the wet and make me wheel into door frames,
leaving people wondering why I’d suddenly
lost control of myself; that day not so long ago
when you chose your moment spectacularly to pull this trick,
I was wheeling out of the psychiatrist’s office
and he just stood and looked at me
as I worked with all my left arm muscles to
skim clear of his door and he no doubt wondered
what else was wrong with me.

I remember the lovers I have had in the last 5 years…
the sex I have almost had on you, only to decide
it was too awkward and be pulled away and onto the floor,
a bed, a lover’s body. My naked body finds you
afterwards for trips into the bathroom and shower.
You become part of the afterglow of our fucking
as parts of me and my lovers leak onto you,
even as I try and keep you clean,
to keep you out of it.

Sex must not come with me as I wheel down the street
to my parent’s house, as I sit for dinner. I could cover you
with towels as I make my way from bed to shower
but there isn’t time, the naked laughing woman
propels me forward and just I don’t care.

I make you sound so dirty, so beautifully fucking dirty.
And you are. It’s not that I don’t wash your covers
becoming self-conscious of the parts of me
that have leaked onto and into you.
It’s that we are linked you and I.
We spend each day, each and every day, touching.
You are mine. My space. My personal space.
here are few who are close enough to me
to be able to sit in you and have me watch
without feeling invaded.

I think of a lover, still fresh enough to sting,
who was the first to include you in our kissing,
in our cuddling, in our hot lead-up to sex.
Times spent getting about the house with her on my lap,
facing me wheeling us with her hands.
No one before had thought this sexy, fun.
It was something that she just did with
laughter and passion leaving me feeling such a rush of
love and intimacy with you, with her,
with myself and this embodiment.

There was a time when wheelchair + me = terror.
Remnants of a childhood spend with the message
drilled into my body daily that ‘walking’ was the
Holy Grail and to end up in a wheelchair
was worse than death. You will have no friends,
no one will love you, you will never have a boyfriend
words spoken by family-still lingers within me.

It’s time. It’s time to practice radical politics
to inhabit who and how I am in the world fully
and you, my shinny, glide-y exoskeleton are part of my life,
part of how I move, how I experience space
and a big part of how I am seen in the world.
I belong to a species of wheelchair Krips, queers, radicals
Body revolutionaries!

f3ckability: creating a disability sexual revolution!
http://f3ckability.blogspot.com.au
http://www.youtube.com/user/f3ckability
f3ckability@gmail.com

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