And a man is so fucking happy for me. I am head-
to-toe in gold, painted stripes, liquor dribbling

over my eyelids. I slosh back
So build me a stadium. Another man wants
to know what it’s like at the game, I say

it’s like an angel brown with tobacco
spit and bourbon. I used

to think some men were built

better. I used to think shoulder pads were muscle
through to the core.
I goddamn love that cumshot feeling

the clock ticking down, the spike
in the end zone, the personal / foul. I’m covered

in the juice of it. I want a man to text me,
Fuck you, Dorsey.
I’ll shoot a sonnet back, That really means  a lot.

At the poetry open-mic, I watch a woman
flirt while I drink water in my fox fur coat
and think Jesus is it almost February
already? To psyche myself up, I did black
winged eyeliner, wine dark lips. Still
this beige, this nude nothingness buzz.
I try to metaphor desire, but it’s just
a thin veil for “I want—”: Desire is
a pair of leather pants. Desire is a throat
full of come. Desire is the endless scroll
of videos, the stretch marks un-stretching
from my stomach. A man presses his face
into the woman’s abdomen below her breasts.
He thumbs her ear next to the jukebox.
When he gets a drink, she swears she’s not
feeling him. Lately, I am having a hard time
feeling anything. I am one of my son’s plastic
balls rolling down its track, the hollow clatter
that repeats, repeats, repeats. My need
used to pulse and ripple the surface of me—
a bulging, hungry, thrum waiting to combust.
Now, the me that wants is down a deep well,
Silence of the Lambs-style. I follow them home
and she clutches his arm and I want to stop
and spin her around and say, You can’t do this
to me, I am in my fox fur coat. The sidewalk
is cracked and the streets are dark and the week
is only beginning to unfold its ugly efforts.
The cold raws my cheeks with its quiet, little beat:
just me, just me, just me.

I have written many poems this week
with my tits poking through secret holes,
pump chugging vaguely like a sex toy,
its rhythmic robot square dance pulsing
on the desk next to white mugs, tin cans,
glass urn, all containers for liquids, as I am
obliged to nourish myself while outside
it is all wisteria and crabapple, grass wafting
in sun like some exhausting metaphor.
I have a million thoughts a day and none
of them want to be poems. You get used to it:
humming motor, baby blue but not a baby,
until you hardly hear it chanting at you,
saying fool space fool space fool space fool.