I pity you
though you might kill me
I am a piano and the keys
of my crotch are seaglass
Worn away by pound
by touch
Manhattan makes wraiths
of women like me
At 4 AM this January morning
Time lived between my legs
Till they ripped Time out,
leaving me
Only the Immediate
and Eternity
I’ve searched the interstellar dark
even though I’ve heard
Once torn away
like lost summer nights
Time won’t come back.
In August the wanting sex
from stoop-sitting boys
pulses rhythmic as traffic
Hyacinth kisses shiver in thick
shadows behind their knees
Now Ice rusts their throats
How many voices are impaled on the
razorwire strangling vacant lots?
How many murdered girls cry out
from the park’s dark clarinet?
These nights I walk through ice,
dragging sleep meant for men impaled
by the view out their window
Men drowned in constellations
shot dead as they fled the sky
Tongues wait in the
Torn out like Time
they’ll never speak
I am a piano and the
keys of my crotch
are sidewalks
jellyfished with brine
I knock hoping you won’t open
but if you do I hope you won’t
see the murdered clarinets
in the dark behind my teeth
You’re wearing the thick terry robe
barely tied
Your room moisturized with the luxury
of a gardenia holding absence
You give me your fear and
your voice’s glass dust
in a box
You will make me open carefully
I can tell by your eyes
you’ve seen the vacant buildings’
toothless mouths
I can tell by the tense of your lips
you’ve heard the murdered girls cry
hides thick within your cheeks
The dullness at the windows
is all that remains
of the flypaper that once wrapped you,
That you can’t rinse away
from your sleep
I am a mirror that wants to incarnate
All the tenderness
We’ve never found before it smashes
The closer you come the more
Space inside me explodes
against my throat
You live in my throat, thighs and aching fingers
as a violent skyscraper of lack
I rub serpentines into your shoulders
Erasing me, you rub money into my hips
Your pubic hair sticks to my cheek
Pinning me to the mattress
Is how you refuse to use a condom
This darkness is not as light to us
though sometimes
I see light bubbling
from my breath
During my dives
in the Night underneath you
Fling me across the bed
in rips of shipwrecked sail
Till I cling in curling seaweed at your feet
I implore you
Throw me back into the Oceanic night
Which is my only Freedom from you
Where I wait for the first
panted breaths between stars
And gulp cold-throated rain
This is a sketch of what it feels like to be trafficked in prostitution in Manhattan
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