 |
The Hiss Quarterly Vol. 5 ~ Issue 1 Fourth Annual NC17 Issue Naughty Bits |
|
|
A Short History of Self Hatred See the fixed fresh face of that white daisy girl spreading against the itchy blanket of her little hateful town more like a weed than a flower. Grown men told her about niggers and queers. Her own mother got called wetback or beaner – by her own husband, the girl’s father, who called her and her mother ugly for fun. See the light, glinting and strange buried deep in the gut of that girl, pinching against the corners of the box where her heart has been replaced by the dead black flies she swept with her hand from the corners of her open window. Imagine her cousins’ and brothers’ misuse of her. The taking into the bathroom, the locking of the door, the pulling on the sweater, the quarter they paid, the shushing of the secret, the shaking of her hands, the numbness of her lips, the terror in her belly, the sinister belief in their right to have her if they wanted. See that room in which she was raped, robin’s egg blue, a blaze of rage, his hairless back and its spotty constellation of light brown moles. She doesn’t remember anything else. Except later, she escaped that room and broke like some quick sparrow away from that little bush where her mother remains trapped and clamoring for her body which will never be hers again. |
|
We Take What We Get In the soft shrill light of me, fire- crackers jumped off sure skin. When you reached wetly into the slime of that stone-sweet carving, did you imagine I could be so angularly pure? You woke me up to turn me over and go down the long length of me where I could scatter up into your hands. You admitted in the foggy morning, through cigarette smoke and laughter, it was watching me drive through Manhattan that made the having necessary and who was I to deny your pleasure? |  |
