How I Like My Women
I like my women slight and frail, bones
hollowly light, ribcages pressed
like prison bars against the skin.
I love the women with stomachs caved in,
divots carved like ice cream scoops
below breasts begging to melt. It’s the women
with the lips like readied blisters, skin sautéed
in good genes and creams
that remind me how exquisite we are
and of all I’ll never be.
Sour Cream Raisin Pie
I balanced sour
cream raisin pie on fingers
filed into coffins—did my best
to stop the curdling. Nebraska
demands a fattening, a suffocation
in cream thickened peak
stiff with winter beatings.
When you asked what I missed
from my childhood, it was all
succulence slipped through lips.
My mother’s roast beef
I pretended to hate at ten
in hopes of a Wendy’s burger
quartered and flailing
in ketchup. Ham and cheese on Franz
bread whenever I smell
the ocean. Sipping Coke
from a bent spoon like it’s gazpacho,
only my thin flesh cushioning
the grind between bone and steel.
None of the missings
are for something so decadent
as this screaming of colostrum
stolen from shaking animal teats,
heavy, stinking, and melting
beneath my creaking airplane seat.
Try This On
I put on weight slowly, carefully,
contrived. It was pure
muscle, all Does this curve
make me look fat? and
Does this vein make me look jacked?
I eased into it, tried it on,
took it back off then slipped
into it again. It was odd, feeling
Normal. Not all size zeroes
fit anymore. Sometimes
my thighs kiss each other, skeletons
no longer stare back from mirrors.
And I miss them,
at times, those ghosts, the bony
collar bones and knocking knees
so beautiful in the haunting.
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