from: The Monogamist
Then I was at the embassy.
Then I was picking up
chunks of ice a truck had
dumped off by the side
of the freeway.
Then I was in my car
listening to the radio.
A guy going on about the
history of European
socialism and this very
specific way men had
of jacking off during
the long fifteenth century.
Hic, haec, hoc won’t stop fucking me
I’ve run out of sugar to stop it.
When I was twelve or thirteen I lived for a
summer next to a cold creek. Back then that
was what was known as the politics of “long
distance women”, or forgetting to hold your
pocketbook close to your chest. Let’s get to
work! And all the husbands in line at
Safeway do their very best to remain unpainted,
although some are still slightly bruised. I still
remember that morning when I had the rare
luxury of moving the entire prehistory of my sex
life counter-clockwise. Smaller than usual atoms
are always the most fertile. And it calms me. Like
a brand new estrogen patch. Or pouring someone
else’s hot soup all the way down the drain.
Your cock looked a little dogwood the first time
you took it out. Had you left it inside another
language for too long? Or was it late to pick up
its prescription? Every hour more rescuers are
needed in the flood zone. More lines of cable
desperately have to be lain. What makes a line
in a poem? In a body? That so many migrant
boats are at the very bottom of the Mediterr
anean. Let me tell you what history teaches,
said mother Gertrude Stein. History teaches.
The Byzantine Empire is a sensation.
Like going in for a full bikini wax but
deciding instead to stop eating meat.
I know you had a pretty decent childhood.
And I admire you for that.
Which makes it even more strange that you
felt the need to write me a list of all your
sexual sticking points.
Since this morning I’ve taken a shower
three times execution style.
And now whenever someone says the
word “poem” I always hear “she really
wanted to do it but her prolapsed uterus kept getting in the way.”
What is rightly sucked.
What is left barren during all the long
summer months.
What happens to a man’s erection when you
tell him that Western Literature started
when a bunch of Greek guys tried to
fuck another man’s wife.
I stand or fall with the very thickness of this.
These pieces come from a project I’ve been working on called “The Monogamist.” In the work we follow a woman who’s doing something that I think we’ve all done-she’s trying to figure out the relationship she’s currently in-and in so doing, she thinks about language, the body, what it means to be a woman who is very loud about her own horniness-which my phone just auto-corrected to “hormones,” which, I suppose, makes sense since she is going through menopause.
This is what the project wants to be. What it refuses to be is yet another Madame Bovary story of a woman who suffers because of whom or how she loves. And it refuses to depict a woman’s body as solely a site of trauma, or of male desire. Instead, I wanted to blow these two things up and find a way to tell a different sort of story-while at the same time, always acknowledging and grappling with the fact that trauma and the male gaze are very real and ever-present.