I met a man who liked
my two fingers
rammed up his ass. It was as though
some Lucky Charm cereal prize
had, inadvertently, wedged there
somewhere back in childhood.
His single-minded intent was that I retrieve
it.
Another asked if he could spray my belly.
Big, loopy circles of piss like a toddler
with his first watercolor set.
Mickey played me one-on-one
at the school basketball court
until we glistened with sweat,
then licked salt from each other’s pits.
It all comes down to
liquid and games.
When I was five my
sister and I danced
through the sprinkler, capturing mists
in our swimsuits. Come bedtime, tented
underneath cool, starched sheets,
we tongue-traced the constellation of our
freckles.
Do you believe
children are erotic?
What if I say
children express themselves in ways we
view as erotic?
If I tell you momma
spanked my bare bum,
repeatedly, are you stimulated?
My sister and I pirated peacock feathers
from Grandma’s floral arrangement.
They were exquisite as elbow-length gloves,
as boas, as a pillbox hat. We masked our faces
with those iridescent turquoise eyes, then
tickled
our summer-bared calves. Later,
when I was the first to sprout,
my brother and his friend pinned me, ripped
my shirt and tickled until I cried.
Sex is as much an
arena of humiliation as it is
a resurrection of
childhood pleasure.
Ed wanted hand jobs.
When he closed his
eyes I swear his face softened
until he was no longer a mechanic gauging hands
with screwdrivers, softened all the way back to
junior high,
flipping straight to the bras in the Sears
catalogue.
Do you find this poem
distasteful?
Do you find it
obscene?
Do you ever tickle
your nephew or niece?
Some games are not
fun at all. Like soccer in he rain.
Or tug of war when
the strength is displaced to one side
and my team is dragged through mud. Like Warren.
He didn’t like to
touch. He wanted us snow shoeing
Snoqualmie Pass where we’d blow out our brains,
make blood angels in the snow.
And Daddy fantasized about being a pimp.
So at two a.m. there I was locked in the
bathroom screaming
that I wouldn’t dance for his drunken friends.
Daddy liked to say
“It all comes down to sex”
but sex is not sex at all.
Those forty-year-old
men hankering my fourteen-year-old hymen
could have hired hookers or gone home to their
wives.
And that voyeur I’ve been dating
do you believe I
would date a voyeur?
the one who sat in his car outside my window,
cooing obscenities in his cellular, leaving
voice mail
about the sensual way I applied nail polish
while smoking,
if he was after standard
sex he merely had to rap my window.
If you believe I
would date a voyeur
do you then believe I am an
exhibitionist?
At this very moment I am getting off.
I am masking it as art; specifically
as a poem.
Poetry is cerebral. It is
high-culture.
When I was a child,
mother burned
Daddy’s low-culture skin-rags in the fireplace,
racking nymphomaniac bimbos over the coals.
While those women
burned we ran outside
to catch the falling squares,
the literal, singed pieces of thigh, cunt, ass.
We’ve evolved past
soot and ash
and mask our voyeurism as educational.
On Public Broadcast they show
monkeys mating, alligators at angles
we could never duplicate, the male shark
dragging the female to deeper water.
Nothing gets me hotter than two slugs, mid-air,
writhing at the end of their own silvery mucus.
Do you think nature shows pander to our
base instincts?
Should we censor the act of elk
reproducing?
How about the hippo?
Pictures of fully clothed women when those women are obese
are considered fetish and relegated to backrooms.
One out of four Americans is overweight.
Do you think they are asexual?
In the break room we pink and white shirts shed
our professional demeanor; leave straitjackets
in our cubicles, roll up our sleeves, suck down
smokes
and coffee, talk gutter-talk.
We are masculine,
bragging up escapades
in the gritty tongue of pornography; feminine,
we pose our desirability in seductive light
revealing
more about ourselves than any beaver shot could
reveal.
Do you believe I let
my voyeur boyfriend
take snapshots of my beaver
because he couldn’t understand my poems?
Last week the Sex Police broke down my door.
I was riding on top, brandishing my vibrator
like a whip--
so they handcuffed me, hauled me off to jail.
Do you believe there
is such a thing as Sex Police?
Do you believe sex is private or
political?
The Sex Police interrogated me for six hours,
meticulously recording my sexual deviations:
Had I tried nipple clamps, butt-plugs?
Did I find pictures of naked women stimulating?
Of naked men? How many partners had I had?
What were there colors? Their genders?
What did I put in my mouth?
Yes. I
broke their laws. No. I would not
recant.
The interview was
videotaped.
When they hauled me to my cell I saw
a long line of journalists, of congressmen,
detectives,
priests, anti-pornographers and that famous
TV evangelist with the perfect coif, all
fisting dollars,
jostling for their copy of the tape.
They
may be disappointed. I have nothing new
to add.
Do you think a good society needs to be
monitored?
Do you believe fantasy always leads to
intent?
Intent to action? Do you think of
physics when you masturbate?
It isn’t about sex at all.
It is about choosing teams and not being left
out.
It comes down to power to choose
what we embrace, what we reject.
It comes down to enlarging our gender such that
when I caught my husband wearing my bra and
panties,
his thighs shaved, gut sucked in front of the
mirror
and me penciling in a ‘stasche and machismo,
we did not rush ashamed, back to our roles,
but swapped places, like collecting
trading cards, displaying the cardboard faces,
comparing statistics. We were figuring out
which cards were missing, still to be sought
and bought, regardless of cost.
It comes down to
teasing, hiding the ace
behind my back, holding
the straight face of a frequent player.
It comes down to my deciding
when I’ll hand over the checkmate,
the cats-eye marble, that get-out-of-jail free
card.
It comes down to comic books,
flashlights, potato chips and giggling
underneath bed sheets.
Sex is never just sex, after all.
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