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.