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Poetry

Jesse Rice-Evans

By September 26th, 2020No Comments

ISO Femme Top

 

I just wanna be liberated

            -Kanye West

 

If we are anything, we are mismatched, making up for each other’s emptiness.

 

I rattle, gush and curl, wrap across your hips and vanish in a web of blood and static, spitting grime and surge. You flash beige carpeting and disappear, quell my search with a whispered nothing, you love me, you want to know what places make me sad.

 

Anywhere crowded, I say, knowing that New York was not meant for me, claustrophobic and agoraphobic wallowing together in paralysis, paroxysm, the fantasy of you with any other girl, your mouth full of moonstone, mine full of your skin.

 

Instead of forgiveness, let’s try opening. I confess I can’t go anywhere, my heels cracked into blisters, blood, bone sharding in my boot; not only that, but I freeze and hide in strangers’ houses, unable to find a seat, I duck out the back door to smoke, March defiantly crisp, my nails full of silt from clutching every surface until my fingers crack.

 

If I could turn me off, I would. I don’t want to come so fast, to need so much, begging to be filled, ISO femme top, tall, bossy, but also nice and smart, into witchy stuff, poems, also lite d/s maybe, tryna get beat up a lil bit but also self-care

 

Anyway, pitted against everything, I cannot curl far enough into the corner where you tucked my jeans, or someone’s jeans, my t-shirt wet with come and your mouth full again of saliva, the way you gargle it in the night, a canto for my aching wrists.

 

 

Note from the author:
“In light of recent events, I am reconsidering the use of the epigraph for this piece. I’ve chosen to preserve the piece as it was written, with the epigraph serving as a testament of past evocations of ‘liberation’ within West’s—and my—work.”

 

 

 

 

 

Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a queer chronically ill poet from North Carolina. Currently, she teaches queer lit at the City College of New York. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Uninhabitable, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press. She is a Leo sun, Cancer rising, Aries moon (sorry).