It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
1 Sex is in the brain; I’ve been training mine for so long. Please don’t fail me now. 2 The sutures move, pull loose and tight, each stitch a closet in the garment, a room within a room. 3 Doctors make you beg for the comfort of your own body. They tell me my vagina has integrity neither foreshortened nor shallow, its walls intact. As apparatus goes, there’s nothing I lack. What their excises have decreed let no woman question. 4 Ordinary motion presses against the scar, life a big toe stretching and pulling the darn. My stomach puckers, pantyhose skin center- seamed. By reflex, I reach to take it off and realize I’m already naked, belly button to pubic bone. 5 Fifteen to thirty minutes of visualizing—face under a pillow, seam-side down, my partner rubbing rubbing—and still I catch no charge. 6 After so much probing, mental inquiry: If I am the sock monkey, who’s my puppeteer? 7 When I finally orgasm, I think I’ve escaped, and my body lifts a finger.
Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers is a queer, nonbinary poet, writer, book critic, and farmer. A graduate of Penn State and Old Dominion University, their creative work has been published in venues such as Gulf Stream, IthacaLit, Menacing Hedge, and Peculiar. They were a 2018-19 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow, and their critical work has appeared in Orion, LitHub, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Millions, Foreword Reviews, and others. Find them talking about books and other passions on Twitter @murderopilcrows.
**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile phone and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.