I.
A white man wearing nothing
but assless overalls is sucking
another white man off in a corn field
and I’m too busy thinking about cash crop
economy to cum. The video refreshes and
among the stalks, those curvatures snake
down towards sprouting tufts of brown hair.
Greedy hands full of pesticides and cultivated earth.
I yell at the screen leave the rifles home
this time, boys! There are no watchful eyes here,
just hills and cattle sleeping on their feet.
II.
In the porn I direct inside my head, there is a
car blazing, I am stranded on the side of the highway.
No one coming to get me in this dress,
in this body I can’t pretend against.
No one to give me that whole road,
long and intimately familiar.
I haphazardly walk alongside
the dip of grass beside the gravel’s border,
waiting with my skyward thumb for
a man to know his way
on me in both directions. After what feels
like ages, a busted Toyota honks me over
from behind, and this is how it ends:
with me, wrestling the handle of the passenger
door and vanishing completely.
I Explain Dysphoria to the Person Who Ponders the Whereabouts of My Manhood
And I am thinking it is enough to continue
dying these small deaths. Like stones
in a sweater's draping tuck, somewhere,
decomposing is akin to my body unloving
herself back into a standing position.
I fear I may become many sisters lost
to the backseat of cabs and river throats.
So many limbs in the rearview bent like twigs
and backbone. Somewhere, mathematics is
a myth and safety is in numbers. I have tucked
my bones to sleep and closed the door
in a house that is both stomach and cavern
eating light. I have located my hunger
and banished it through the mouth. Somewhere,
I am mouth they pull worm tangles from,
in a taped off creek-bed. It is not enough to kill
me anymore. It is not enough to make me
pay. Somewhere, I am trapped in a magazine
kiosk with a handful of quarters soaked
in blood. Someone in line is tugging down
my skin from the back and this is proof that I
am woman. How to be one with the floor
and laugh into it. How to be one with the room
and be leaving it. Somewhere, a man is disarming
himself and choosing to love me anyways.
Imagine that. Imagine love enters me
and I accept whatever sentence it brings.
Imagine love exits me like a toxin through the nasal
passage and purifies my body. Imagine when I say how
I want this to be over, that what I mean is
I want to be over that hill and running,
featherlight and kissing up the dirt.
Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review Chapbook Series, 2017) and has work featured in or forthcoming from [PANK], Bat City Review, ANMLY, Always Crashing, DREGINALD, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, and Alien Mouth. Her film criticism has been published by IndieWire and her visual art has been featured in ctrl + v Magazine. She received BAs in English and Cinematic Arts from the University of Iowa, and is currently a poetry MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Newark. She tweets mostly nonsense @burritotheif