Nin Andrews is the author of Why They Grow Wings (Silverfish Review Press, 2001), The Book of Orgasms (Cleveland State University) and Spontaneous Breasts. She is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant and has published work in many literary reviews and anthologies including Best American Poetry (1997 and 2001), The Best of the Prose Poem, The Virginia Quarterly, The Paris Review and Ploughshares. She lives in Ohio. The Lost Man Pussies are lucky. They’re not like you. They know their original instructions, and they can just sit back and relax. They don’t have to ponder, "Now what was I going to do next?" Or, "Where was I supposed to go?" So many distracting thoughts, so many missed opportunities. A man like you, he could stay lost a long time. He might even die without knowing what he’d come for. It happens. You know it does. Enlightened Pussy After you left, the pussy felt so lost, she didn’t know where to turn. She had no faith in psychics, weathermen and shrinks who think they can predict the future. She hung out in the waiting room of loss, watching loss, contemplating loss, not yet living her lost lives. She still dreams of you, everywhere you touched her left tiny imprints on her skin, like fingerprints in snow, like tongue marks in frozen custard. Once, when another lover pressed his ears to her soul, he heard not a heart beat, but the silent cries of the drowning. That was the year you were into transcending lust. You called it a quest for enlightenment – leaving her alone in the dark. Each night she could hear your desire, like a phantom, calling and calling her name, drifting and wheeling overhead. She would wonder: does it fly all night long, faster than the speed of sorrow? Buffeted by the frenzied fluttering of so many wings, will it ever find what it craves? One day the barrier between the pussy and loss will lift. The loss will become her, and she, the loss. That will be her satori, her enlightenment. Nothing more. Forever after she will be like a moon in a dark sky. Imagine her power of glowing. And you will be but an unlit sky who never heard of the moon.