![]() Or a storage container for one’s resentmentīank records, birth certificates and the like?Ī surgeon outside the mainstream, on the cheap, I am unsure of how these “pussy” things work. Perhaps I can store some inside me for later use: The insurance company will take Mexican pesos and gold. I am devout in my delusions (I am zealous Iron and diamonds dug from mountains, paid in clotted bloodĪnd blackened lung – the doctors need me to represent the community, ![]() Would buy me some relief? What the hospital needs is cold hard cash, I’ll put it on layaway, get an accountant just so I can sayĪsk regularly if my pussy will get repossessed.ĭid I have the audacity to think a quarter century of profound confusion Like I’d ever buy into them, head to the tourist attractions I still have all the lousy tourist brochuresĪdvertising Being Myself At Last! clinging to them In the way I imagine places without life at all are lonely – (though I do love a captive audience) – it is lonely here I admit I didn’t bring you here to watch me decay into vegetation The clear evidence of blows should be enoughįor them to gather conclusions among the wild onions. The gaps in my memory and constant revisions, If I am here to intrude on women’s spaces The passersby who come intrigued to the floor of the bathroom It doesn’t matter either way if I can pissīut whether I can explain it to the curious, Out of the brutal words and the holes they tore in me The floor’s grout, and out of me, too, will come Ivy first and creepers, thin weeds between Pussy now intact, recovered, and fully integrated into human society, To their own little world of plumbing and mayflies. Long after the fears have stopped their desperateĪnd after the anxieties have skittered away through crevices ![]() Maybe it’s already happened – after all, this poem will exist before and after, I suppose it could be the floor of the operating theater. They’re laying with us on the bathroom floor. That my will could shape my breasts, that in me layĪnd lives in as deep a darkness as the giant squid,īlind and milky, alongside my eely fears and reptilian anxieties. This is where I lay when I realized that this was not the only world,Īnd that someone moved on the other side, and where I knew Little knowledge that this is, I’ve kept here on the bathroom floor, Thick with the odors of trash, human sweat, and exhaust to hide under. That one I spirited away on a warm wind over New York in August, I kept that feeling in a pit in the middle of a snowy plain.įear that no one who knew would touch me – Like how much I hated my body as a teenager, ![]() It’s funny how your brain keeps things from you. If I get soaked from the ludicrous joy of impossibility made real. Or if I bleed all over after the surgery, In case I forget how to piss, or never learn again, This is why we’re on the floor of the bathroom:Ĭonsults, forms, cleanses, recoveries bloody, boring, long and dull – Secondhand, even, if that’s an option, Zipper, Velcro. The Spirit airlines of pussies, the Kmart pussy, a lemon, No cupholders, leather interior, or rims – think I’ll be happy then? What if I can only afford the econi–pussy, If I need to put my new pussy on layaway. I’ll ask how much it’ll cost, whether insurance covers it, I’m ready to tell you: I’m going to do it. The bed itself, heat, your body’s own softnesses a sickening pillow. When sick seems unbearable, your blankets, Like beachglass shorn enough of edges for taking homeĪnd putting in a jar – what was normally soft and friendly Like the war stories of our grandfathers, lacking names,ĭetails, context – polished stones – or better yet, Remember the uncomfortable cold and smooth hard surface– How alien the tiles were against your face. To go to school – I’ll be remembering the same thingĪt the same time, half-jokingly eulogizing myself I loved the ending and yet was sorry to see the poem end.” -Maggie Smith In this sense, the poem is embodying, enacting-with humor and vulnerability and pain, which coexist together here. “This poem looks a little wild, a little unwieldy, unspooling down the pages-and this feels just right to me formally because what it’s sharing with us resists containment and tidiness. “Layaway” by Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen is the 2nd place winner for the 2021 Sappho Prize, selected by guest judge Maggie Smith.
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