november 17th 

so right now I’m sort of in this place of crisis, of why write about my stupid feelings in the face of so much real shit, like how– or honestly why?—would I give you a poem about how I feel neglected by my father and so I have weird sex about it or about how I once had a dream about my crush standing next to a pickup truck in the rain and it fucked me up for five years?
or how I have taken the fact that I am shitty at being an older sister and internalized it as a metaphor about how I’m sort of generally an asshole
how can I keep on doing this when it feels like the actual fucking apocalypse is coming?

when climate change might actually kill me and everyone else before my anxiety about old age really kicks in? when a dude who straight-up wants to treat cute lil sexual deviants like me with electroshock therapy like we’re in the fucking Bell Jar is going to be the Vice President of this country I’m in love with? when so many things feel like they’re gonna get worse before they get better, and climate change might actually kill us all before we get to the better? why write poems?

so I was thinking about this, and for some reason I kept thinking about all of the times I dabbled in being a dominatrix. I’ll come back around to that in a minute.

whether or not I think of myself as like, a human woman changes on pretty much a daily basis, most of the time I feel like some kind of genderless space alien who crash landed into a high school production of a second-rate musical and then just kind of… went along with the whole being a human thing because, you know, when in Rome.

but I like wearing bold lipstick and showing too much side boob and devouring the hearts of men and getting spanked and calling people daddy and getting bought presents and literally punching men in the dick when they’re cool with it and wearing nipple clamps while sitting in a dark theater and making plans to help someone put their girlfriend through the stations of the cross

and probably in my heart of hearts i’m a bratty teenage girl with a big dick whose primary interest is making people nervous
especially men
And I think about the man who paid me to go to a hotel by the airport
And get sent to the principal’s office with a teacher’s note
(did I mention yet that I am a teacher?)
and spanked with a hairbrush against the hotel mirror

And I think about the man who paid me to piss in his wine glass
In the bathroom of a fancy downtown restaurant
And I think about how they thought they were in charge
That their money made them the ones in control

And I think about the men who yell at me in the street
Who think their voices make them the ones in control
Or their fast cars
Or the way they get away with it

And I think about Lolita, our little lady of dolorous haze
How, spoiler alert, in the book, She dies in childbirth
Because every old man narrator knows that being a woman kills character
That a femme with agency blooms too big for the page
and will outweigh a novel
And I think about how everyone seems to think
That the dirty old man is the protagonist
Even though the girl is the one who changes

And I think about how we scare the shit out of you
All us dirty little girls
And it doesn’t matter who is holding the paddle
We are powerful because you are afraid, you are awed

You are a new father staring at a mystery
You are a new lover frightened by the breadth of your desires
The future is femme, and she wants to meet you in the woods
Behind the high school, but that doesn’t mean you know what to do with her

If you really want to do it for me
You’re gonna need more than three hundred dollars
and a sense of entitlement
I want to watch you reach up inside yourself and
find what you’re afraid of
and make out with it
until you feel whole