SO THIS IS THE END.
Or this is the beginning.
If I cut my hair off
and buy new lipstick,
it almost doesn’t feel like
starting over.It feels like emerging.
Like soaking in light.
Like drawing curtains back.
Like pulling myself
out of the bed
for the first time
in two weeks
and showering.Making tea.
Putting away my
coffee cups.
i. maybe it’s 2015 and gay marriage is legal in all fifty states: but when someone asks my sexuality, my tongue still sticks to the roof of my mouth for a moment.
ii. my best friend in the front seat asks over her shoulder, “if you’re 80% gay, does that mean you only love him with 20% of your heart?”
iii. the first time i kissed her, the boys around us made it about them, about their howls. i stopped breathing on the cusp of her lips. i was made holy by her.
iv. in church, we bow our heads. how can i move my mouth in a prayer for forgiveness when i fully intend to sin again. i say, “forgive me father” anyway, just in case it sticks.
v. my father does not forgive. i say, “she’s hot,” absently. his face turns white, then red. “not in my house,” he says.
vi. the first time i come out in public, it’s to a boy smoking cigarettes. he spits and laughs. “bisexuals aren’t really part of this discussion, sweetie.” my girlfriend holds my hand and i don’t throw up. i learn my place quickly: gay rights do not belong to me.
vii. they are ace. the two of us make jokes back and forth about the cloak of invisibility we must be harnessing. when they are too drunk, i walk them home. when i have fallen yet again for the wrong girl, they hold my hand while i tremble. we do not go to the pride parade, where we do not belong, where i will be a breeder and they will not even be acknowledged.
viii. “but are you really gay? so do you love him? so do you love him?”
ix. it is fine and we just won’t tell her parents. it is fine and my grandmother can’t ever know it. the world is different now, i hear. in frat houses, i am the picture of their wet dreams. on tv, i’m just a picture, the girl who is “just experimenting.” in “my” community, i am only allowed in by the skin of my teeth.
x. it is 2015. he asks me if i’m “like that” and i feel my whole body exploding.
about a reverse little mermaid, in which the prince’s sister has always dreamed of life under the sea, and then they are in a shipwreck, and as she hangs onto a piece of driftwood, she sees her brother rescued from drowning by a mermaid. Everybody thinks she’s mad, later, after she’s been rescued. But her brother did turn up alive and unharmed on the beach, and she knows what she saw: a girl, beautiful as the dawn, with a fish’s tail, keeping her brother safe above the waves. She grows sick with longing.
So the princess goes to visit the witch who lives in the woods, and she tells her that she can give her a mermaid’s tail and a mermaid’s breath–but she will always be human in her heart and in her soul, unless she can convince one of the merfolk to fall in love with her. For humans live short lives, and their immortal souls vanish to distant realms after death, while the merfolk live for hundreds of years, and when they die they remain in the sea that is their home.
The princess agrees, and the witch tells her she will make a potion that she must swallow when she wants to transform. But then she reminds her that she must be paid–and laughs at her when she offers gold. She tells her that she will have her voice, and slowly the princess agrees, so she cuts off her tongue and throws it into a boiling pot, adds a knot of snakes and a drop of her own black blood, and gives her the resulting potion to drink.
At midnight, she takes the potion out to the jetty, and as soon as it passes her lips, her legs are bound together, becoming a mermaid’s tail. She falls–kinda ungracefully–into the ocean, and it feels unbelievably natural to dive down, and she’s shocked by how well she can see, even in the deep water, even at midnight. And then she just sort of carelessly, cluelessly swims on, and she almost gets eaten by a shark, and then she’s trailing blood in the water so she almost gets eaten by another shark, and another, and she can’t find the merfolk city she’s always been taught was under the water, and it’s late and she’s exhausted and is running from all sorts of terrifying creatures who she’d never really thought about existing before, and she only escapes the sharks by dodging past a whirlpool, and then another whirlpool, close to the ocean bottom. She passes through a series of foaming whirlpools like a labyrinth, and then she sees a white house on the ocean bottom, in the middle of a strange forest of polypi. The polypi are half animal, half plant, reaching out and grasping at anything they can touch. The princess swims carefully through it, and she sees that there are things caught in the polypi’s arms: anchors, planks, wooden chests, the white skeletons of drowned men. A little mermaid. She makes it to the house, and recoils when she realizes that it’s also made of bleached human bones.
@editorincreeps, have you read this bit of magnificence?
Fingers in my mouth, his other hand resting at the back of my neck, those two things always get my attention. My mind quiets, my breathing slows and I can focus on just being. He’ll use that time to talk about things he wants to try with me. Rope, wrestling, positioning and posing. All of that, described in glorious detail. I sometimes catch myself humming and drooling a bit as he talks. My anxious brain can chill, if only for a bit, and I just take note of everything. The way his accent peaks out when he’s excited, the way his fingers bounce when he brings something new up, how our chests start to rise and fall in unison. It’s intimate and soft and true. Sometimes, he describes things that I don’t think I’d like, but that’s okay too. I’ll tell him so and he’ll gather information and move on or reformulate. That’s one of the best feelings. We can be vulnerable, and when it’s a no, that no is never harsh.
Let’s talk about an Ariel who walks away—limping, mouthing inaudible sailors’ curses, a sea-brine knife in her belt.
Ariel traded her voice for a chance to walk on land. That was the deal: every time she steps, it will feel like being stabbed by knives. She must win the hand of her one true love, or she will die at his wedding day, turn to sea foam, forgotten. The helpful steward tells her to dance for the prince, even though her feet scream each time she steps. Love is pain, the sea witch promised. Devotion calls for blood.
But how about this? When the prince marries another, nothing happens. When Ariel stands over the prince and his fiance the night before their wedding, her sisters’ hard-won knife in hand, she doesn’t decide his happiness is more important than her life. She decides that his happiness is irrelevant. Her curse does not turn on the whims of this boy’s heart.
She does not throw away the knife and throw herself into the sea. She does not bury it in the prince and break her curse—it would not have broken. She leaves them sleeping in what will be their marriage bed and limps into a quiet night, her knife clean in her belt, her heart caught in her throat. Her feet scream, but they ache, too, for the places she has yet to see.
Ariel will not be sea foam or a queen. There is life beyond love. There is love in just living. Her true love will not be married on the morn—the prince will be married then, in glorious splendor, but he had never been why she was here.
Ariel traded her voice for legs to stand on, a chance at another life. When she poked her head above the waves, it wasn’t the handsome biped that she fell for. It was the way the hills rolled, golden in the sun. It was the clouds chasing each other across blue sky, like sea foam you could never reach.
(She does reach it, one day, bouncing around in the back of a tinker’s cart, signing jokes to him in between helping to tune his guitar. They crest up a high mountain pass and into the belly of a cloud. Her breath whistles out, swirls water droplets, and she reaches out a hand to touch the sky. Her feet will scream all her life, but after that morning they ache just a little bit less).
I want an Ariel who is in love with a world, not a prince. I don’t want her to be a moral for little girls about what love is supposed to hurt like, about how it is supposed to kill you. Ariel will be one more wandering soul, forgotten. Her voice will live in everything she does. She uses her sisters’ knife to turn a reed into a pipe. She cannot speak, but she still has lungs.
Love is pain, says the old man, when Ariel smiles too wide at sunrises. It’s pain, says the innkeeper, with pity, as Ariel hobbles to a seat, pipe in hand. At least you are beautiful, soothes the country healer who looks over her undamaged feet. The helpful steward had thought she was shy. Dance for the prince even though your feet feel stuck with a hundred knives.
Her feet feel like knives but she goes out dancing in the grass at midnight anyway. She’s never seen stars before. Moonlight reaches down through the depths, but starlight fractures on the surface. Ariel dances for herself.
She goes down to caves and rocky shores. Sometimes she meets with her sisters there. Mouths filled with water cannot speak above the sea, so she drops into the waves and they sing to her, old songs, and she steals breaths of air between the stanzas. She can drown now. She holds her breath. She opens her eyes to the salt and brine.
Ariel uses canes and takes rides on wagons filled with hay, chickens, tomatoes—never fish. She earns coins and paper scraps of money with a conch shell her youngest sister swam up from the depths for her, with her reed pipe, with a lyre from her eldest sister which sounds eerie and high out of the water. The shadow plays she makes on the walls of taverns waver and wriggle like on the sea caves of her childhood, but not because of water’s lap and current. It is the firelight that flickers over her hands.
When she has limped and hitched rides so far that no one knows the name of her prince’s kingdom, she meets a tinker on the road with an extra seat in his cart and an ear for music. He never asks her to dance for him and she never does. She drops messages in bottles to her sisters, at every river and coastline they come to, and sometimes she finds bottles washed up the shore just for her.
They travel on. When she breathes, these days, her lungs fill with air.
Some nights she wakes, gasping, coughing up black water that never comes. There is something lying heavy on her chest and there always will be.
Somewhere in the ocean, a sea witch thinks she has won. When Ariel walks, she hobbles. Her voice was the sunken treasure of the king’s loveliest daughter, and so when they tell Ariel’s story they say she has been robbed. They say she has been stolen.
She has many instruments because she has many voices—all of them, hers; made by her hands, or gifted from her sisters’ dripping ones. Ariel will sing until the day she dies with every instrument but her vocal cords.
She cannot win it back, the high sweet voice of a merchild who had never blistered her shoulders red with sun, who had never made a barroom rise to its feet to sing along to her strumming fingers. She cannot ever again sing like a girl who has not held a dagger over two sleeping lovers and then decided to spare them. She decided not to wither. She decided to walk on knives for the rest of her life. She cannot win it back, but even if she could, she knows she would not sound the same.
They call her story a tragedy and she rests her aching feet beside the warming hearth. With every new ridge climbed, new river forded, new night sky met, her feet ache a little less. They call her a tragedy, but the tinker’s donkey is warm and contrary on cold mornings. The tinker’s shoulder is warm under her cheek.
Her feet will always hurt. She has cut out so many parts of her self, traded them up, won twisted promises back and then twisted them herself. She lives with so many curses under her skin, but she lives. They call her story a moral, and maybe it is.
When she breathes, her lungs fill. When she walks, the earth holds her up. There is sun and there is light and she can catch it in her hands. This is love.
I want to see Greek gods in the modern era.
I want to see Zeus in a tailored suit and shaggy beard, a
walking disparity of the loud, brash, post-graduate frat boy variety who can’t
pass a woman on the street without catcalls, who has more one-night stands than
he could possibly keep in his head, for whom adultery comes as naturally as the
weather he predicts on the Channel 4 News—with startlingly accuracy, and an
endless wealth of charisma.I want to see Hera walking tall, six-inch heels and not a
wrinkle in her skirt, knowing her boyfriend is cheating, and knowing with equal
certainty that she is better, stronger, fiercer than he will ever be, a wedding
planner with an eye of steel, spotting vulnerability, slicing it open, teaching
every woman who crosses her path to value themselves over any mistake made in
the name of men and love.I want to see Poseidon in Olympic prime, a gym rat who
skives off class to shatter backstroke records, who spends his summers
lifeguarding at the city pool, who keeps an ever-expanding aquarium in his
bedroom and coaxes all the pretty girls up to visit his fish, his charm as
impressive as the earth-rending temper he generally uses to fuel his competitive
nature.I want to see Hades, big, hulking, quieter than his brothers
would ever think to be, who dresses in neat dark clothes, and polishes his
boots, and spends more time reading than fighting, who debates eventuality and
ethics, who stoically reminds everyone how enormous, how terrifying, how
inescapable a thing like silent inevitability can be.I want to see Hermes in a beanie, with watercolor splashes
of tattoo crawling up his arms and holes in his Chucks, a bike messenger with
no helmet, no regard for the rules of the road, all cataclysmic laughter, lock-pick
tricks passed along to every kid who thinks to ask, thumbing through his iPhone
without a care in the world.I want to see Athena with reading glasses pushed high on her
head, six books in her bag and a switchblade in her back pocket, her clothing
as neatly ordered as her mind is feverish, brilliance and temper clashing and
blending, doing her best to look dignified—even when her brain chemistry
rockets ahead of her well-intentioned plans.I want to see Apollo splattered with acrylics, board shorts
and Monster headphones and a beautiful classic car, busking on street corners,
not because he has no choice, but because the sunlight catching on a
sticker-patterned acoustic is summer incarnate, because music is blood, because
the act of creation is the ultimate in sublime.I want to see Artemis in ripped jeans and haphazard topknot,
star of the soccer team, the track team, the archery team, who rides a
motorcycle, and keeps a tribe of girls around her at all times, and does not
care for men, for expectation, for anything but volunteer hours down at the
local animal shelter and falling asleep under the stars.I want to see Aphrodite in sundress and scarf, homemade
jewelry and lavish amounts of bright red lipstick, who is excellent at public
speaking, at theater auditions, at soothing bruised egos and sparking epic
fights, who kisses as easily as she breathes and scrawls poetry onto bathroom
stalls.I want to see Ares all but living in the boxing ring, cutoff
shirts and sweats, red-faced under a crew cut as he punches, punches, punches
until the noise in his head dims, a warrior with no war, all crude jokes and
blind fury, totally incapable of understanding what it is to sit, think, plan
before running screaming into the fray.I want to see Demeter with the best garden you’ve seen in
your life, with a lawn care business she runs out of her garage, a teenage
prodigy grown into a joint-custody single mother, who teaches her carefree
daughter all she knows while scaring off the hopeful neighborhood boys with the
pet python draped across her shoulders.I want to see Dionysus with a joint in one hand and a bottle
of wine in the other, baggy hoodies and three-week-old jeans, who brews his own
beer in his basement and greets all visitors with a fresh pack of Oreos and
half-stoned theories of the universe, of birth and death and partying mid-week,
because why not, man?I want to see Hephaestus with a workshop taking up the
majority of his house, whose kitchen is overrun with blowtorches, whose bathrooms
are home to all manner of hodge-podge invention, who walks with a cane and
forgets his laundry for weeks at a time, and strings together the most
beautiful steampunk costumes at any convention at the drop of a hat.I want to see wood nymphs fighting against climate change,
waving their signs and pushing for scientific progress. I want to see epic
heroes sitting down to Magic: The Gathering tournaments, poker brawls, Call of
Duty all-nighters with beer and snapbacks. I want to see Medusa working a women’s
shelter, want to see Achilles training for deployment, want to see Prometheus
serving endless community service stints for what he calls providing necessary welfare with stolen goods.Give me modern mythology. I could play for hours in that
sandbox.
I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything’s, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is—a big hole full of things chewing each other—and it’s odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they’re really after as they stare—that ferocious pulse under all things placid.
“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, leaning into me behind the bleachers. Practice was over, most people had gone home, and sweat clung to our bodies matting down our clothes.
But his cock was hard, and I could see it outlined through his shorts. His breath was quick even though we stopped running a long time ago, and I could feel his longing. For just a moment I wondered if that was how I made girls feel: wanted, desired, and afraid of being devoured.
“Who would I tell?” I whispered, my hand reaching down to my own cock. He looked about nervously, but without another word he dropped his shorts and touched himself while I watched. I did the same, my fist a blur as our faces touched, our eyes still looking down.
“Here,” I whispered. “It feels better when someone else does it.”
He moaned when I replaced his hand with my own, but he didn’t stop me. In fact, he reached out and did the same, slowly starting to touch me too as the sounds from his throat grew louder. His breath in my ear was hot and damp and the word hung on his lips, terrified that they might slip out.
“Can I…” he started, and stopped before getting it out.
“Tell me,” I moaned, my hand working faster, harder, and stronger around his hard cock. “Tell me what you want.”
“Are you gonna come?” he asked, his shoulders tensing as he stood up straight. I simply nodded and closed my eyes, feeling his body against mine and his hand around me. Without warning at all he released me and dropped to his knees. I grabbed my own cock in one hand and his hair in the other as I felt his thick lips open.
“Fuck,” I moaned, feeling him take more of me into his mouth. He gagged and coughed, but didn’t stop. I started to thrust, no longer able to hold back at all, and seconds later I started to come in his mouth as he licked and sucked me more frantically than ever.
When I finally pulled back, he simply knelt on the ground, jerking off silently as he licked his lips and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I’m coming dude, I’m gonna fucking…”
And then he was done too, erupting onto his own hand and shorts as he knelt on the grass. I stared in awe, watching for the first time, my body still shaky and weak from my own orgasm. He sat with his head down for just a moment, before jumping back up to his feet and pulling up his shorts.
“No one,” he said again, his eyes back to normal, and the lust all but gone. “I’m serious.”
I made it to the front of the bleachers before I collapsed. I looked up at the blue sky and the empty field and tried to catch my breath. He didn’t so much as say goodbye, but none of that seemed to matter. Laughter caught in my throat as I thought about his words, and before long I could do nothing else.
Who the fuck would believe me?
-gny
Unf.
I was a needy little slut yesterday. My cunt was dripping wet no matter what I was doing. Working, making tea, talking to friends, I could not stop thinking about how much I needed Daddy to fuck me and hurt his little slut.
‘Daddy… please.. I need… I just, I need you to use me, Daddy’
‘I was wondering today if you could do that thing you used to do by playing with your ass only.’
‘….’
‘But then I was like nah, she’s not allowed to at all.’
‘Daddy… I could. I could do it if you wanted me to.’
‘Such a needy little slut. It would only be a one time thing, no more until the rest of the edgings are done. But nah, I don’t think you need to.’
‘But Daddy…!’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at home… why?’
‘You would have to spank your cunt with a belt first. Until it brings tears to your eyes. Then you could play with your ass.’
‘But Daddy… my housemate is here, she’ll hear…’
‘Go to your room. Now. Tell her you have to do something and go.’
‘Yes, Daddy’
‘Now, spread your legs wide. Use one hand to spread open your pussy lips… I want you spanking your clit directly. I want it to hurt.’
‘Daddy… please may I touch myself a little bit first, just to make it a little less scary? Please, Daddy?’
I felt so open and vulnerable, aware of the cool air dancing over my wet pussy, trying as hard as I could to make myself swing the heavy leather belt wrapped around my hand.
‘No, you may not play with my cunt. You may hurt it. You may spank it. And then you may play with my tight little asshole, and you may do that thing you used to do once that way. But you may not play with my cunt. Soon, you won’t be allowed to even play with that, or even be allowed to edge or touch. So I would like to gently suggest that you hurry the fuck up and stop hesitating.’
‘Yes, Daddy.’
Deep breath. Eyes shut tight. Swing.
‘Fuuuuuuck! It hurt so much Daddy!!’
‘mmmm good girl. Now let’s try a harder swing.’
‘owwwww! Daddy please… fuck.. it stings so much’
‘Use your other hand to spread your lips so you can spank your clit directly. Do not hesitate one more time or you’re done. Touching is a privilege which you do not have to be granted. Make. It. Hurt.’
As much as I wanted to obey, it was impossible to force my hand to swing that belt with as much force as Daddy does it. I reminded myself who I belong to. How my every action was his to decide. How he determined when and where I felt pleasure or pain. I swung the belt.
‘Daddy… I’m almost crying, please Daddy…’
‘We are going to play a fun game. When I tell you to, you can play with your clit, simply because I feel like letting you. You will stop when I say stop. Do you understand?’
‘Yes Daddy’
‘Spread yourself. Wider. Spank that cunt as hard as you fucking can. 20 times right there… that little spot where you’re wettest, land the little edge of the belt right there.’
Tears filled my eyes by the time I was done. My cunt was on fire, burning, throbbing, needing to be filled.
‘Daddy, I need… please, please…’
‘Touch now.’
My housemates were a couple of rooms away and yet I could not stop myself from gasping the second I touched myself. So warm, so wet, I arched my back and rubbed fierce circles deep into my clit.
‘Stop.’
‘oh fuck. Fuck. Daddy, please’
‘You’re done with that part. Now you may play with your ass. Get your plug – I want you to think about how I will take your ass. Though this is nothing in comparison. Maybe I will fuck you with that plug in your ass. Play now and do that thing you used to do. Once.’
I cried out as I steadily pushed it into my ass. I knew Daddy was much bigger and would be much less gentle, yet even this hurt. I shook with an entire month’s worth of pent up frustration and need.
‘We are going to have to clean that hole out very well… I am going to go back and forth between your holes, so you will have to be very clean for me. Your mouth too, of course. I am going to use every hole you have and I will fuck you in ways you can’t even fuck a paid whore. I’m going to hurt you in ways your brain can’t comprehend and fuck you in ways that hurt. And you will cum while I do. And then you will just need more and more and more…’
‘I’m your whore, Daddy, you can use me any way you choose’
‘Yes, you are. And I will.’
I could feel it… I was so close. I fucked myself with my plug harder now, mercilessly, the way Daddy would fuck me. My marked, swollen cunt ached from more than just the spanking, desperate to be filled with Daddy’s cock.
‘I need to beg for your cock, Daddy. I need you to split me open and use me’
‘I will rub it up and down your wet little slit, tease you with it, then I’ll push it into you. And when you flinch away from the size, I will simply hit you and tell you not to run away from Daddy’s cock. I will take what is mine, and nothing you want or don’t want will matter.’
‘Daddy.. fuck.. I’m about to… please… please may I?’
‘You may cum this way, properly and fully.’
‘I’m scared, Daddy. I haven’t in so long, fuck’
‘You are allowed to, I’ve given you permission, don’t be scared.’
I’m a little hazy on the details after that. My entire world became an explosion of every nerve ending in my body, as Daddy’s words pushed me over the edge and the orgasm ripped through me. I was crying now, convulsing and screaming with pleasure. Thanking Daddy over and over for letting his little slut do the thing she used to do.
I think I blacked out soon after that. Daddy had me wrap up in a blanket, close my eyes and drift off to sleep.
‘shhhh, relax, it’s ok. Take a nap now, little girl. So you still remember how to do that thing you used to do, eh? Good to know. Sleep now.’
I’m pretty sure several people heard me spank my cunt and play with myself. I guess it was only a matter of time till they knew I was an owned little slut, anyway.
—-
writing: storyofasub.tumblr.com
gif uploaded by dominant88.tumblr.com
The first time a man slaps me on the ass,
I am fourteen years old, bussing tables at a family restaurant.
He asks where I go to college and laughs.
I laugh too but the sound gets caught in my throat.
I haven’t even been kissed for the first time yet.
I have always been told that “boys will be boys”,
so when I come to accept that men will be men,
nobody corrects me.
He wraps his arm around my waist,
hand warm on the place my work shirt rides up
above my khaki shorts—
and frowns when a waitress shoos him away.
I thank her nervously. I’m worried that she’ll think poorly of me.
I trap the word slut in the back of my throat with the laughter.
She tells me that the customer is always right,
so I have to be polite, but I can still say no
if I do it quietly.When I first learn that no does not always stop
slipping lips and wandering hands,
I am sixteen years old in a plaid miniskirt.
I am told that it is my fault for being tempting;
and it feels like the truth.
I already refuse to wear shorts outside of the house.
It makes me nervous to be alone somewhere with another person
when I have a dress on.
I throw out my miniskirts and I apologize.By this time, catcalls make me jump out of my skin.
I never figure out how to take them as a compliment.
I always get uncomfortable when men make jokes
about why women go to the bathroom in groups.
Nobody likes to hear that we are taught from the youngest age
that we should never go anywhere
alone.The second time that no does not stop someone,
I am nineteen years old in the passenger seat of a pickup truck.
My date pulls up in front of my house
but hits the door lock instead of letting me out,
wraps his hand around my throat
because I told him I just thought we should be friends.
When I cry later to my mother about it,
she only asks if he’d been drinking
because you know how men can get sometimes.And I do know how men can get sometimes.
On another date, I am told by a man
that it will be my fault if he ever goes too far
because his brain is wired like an animal.
I want to say that even my dogs recognize the word no,
but I am afraid of how he might react so I don’t argue.
I sit through the rest of the date with a smile on my face.
We even kiss afterwards.
And it is not the last time I try to make kissing into a bandage
for something that never should have happened.The third time is only a few months later.
The third time is the worst time.
When I first say no, I think maybe he doesn’t hear me
but it has nothing to do with volume.
It takes me years to lay on a hammock again.
Spring might always remind me of bursting instead of blooming.I carry my keys just to walk to the mailbox at night.
I’m too paranoid to jog down my street alone.
I am groped on the sidewalk,
I am groped on the bus,
and even once at the grocery store.Newly twenty-one years old,
I am followed all the way to my friend’s car
by a group of men who stand around
laughing and jeering and banging on the windows.
It is the last time I ever let a man buy me a drink at a bar.I have men in my life who call themselves my friends
who put their hands on my hips and my thighs
without my permission.
There is no question.
They do not think they have to ask.
They laugh when I bristle.
They call me bitchy when I tell them to back offbut it takes twenty-two years for me to realize
only I have a right to my body.I used to bite my tongue, but I do not say NO quietly anymore.
I bark my discomfort like an old dog,
weary and uncomfortable even in its sleep.