THIS IS NOT A RIDDLE
What’s that old joke about the snake
that wasn’t a snake? Or was it a pipe?
Ceci n’est pas un—either way,
a mouth tightly latching on.
I don’t know shit about physics
or physique. When the lover left me,
he took another and the energy
rerouted. Solitude as a magic act
as if we ever aren’t together.
What I’m saying is,
when the men make me
into a woman by outlining my body—
hand to waist, pressing down hard
on the breast like a clamp, smashing
fingers into a denim crotch—am I real
or unreal? Pipe, snake, other flickering
trick? Reader, can you see me now?
Cunt crammed against the screen’s
quiet glass, haloed by the internet’s
bright. I’m sorry to be so curt, cut,
violenced—I worry about smothering
language on the page, Word’s dictated
this not that, commanding reality. As if
violence isn’t a verb, though the angry
red line hovers beneath it. Of course
I’ve come to the right place—we set
a date to meet here—I trust you. Here:
a plastic lawn chair, a body, a sun.
Welcome home, baby. This is as real
as I’ll ever get to you—glinting
from the horizon like not-water
on a hot highway.
I SPENT AN ENTIRE LIFETIME TRYING TO BE GOOD
Licking your splinter-paw. Mewling into the gummy
cavern of your inner ear. In the painted vase of my goodness,
I splattered shame all over these walls. I rubbed my sorry
cheeks, arched a Very Limber spine. I rode the tightrope,
cowgirl. Brought my two palms together and acted like
I knew mercy intimately. I watched myself fuck her
on the dust-mattress of her mother’s top terrace, smelled
her perfume the whole plane ride back, even with a misery
-hungry boy-man waiting for me in his golf course home.
Every morning for a year, he brought me a hot thermos of tea.
I collected the tea labels, doodled in I love you’s like tokens—
like proof.
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.