Autoliography, By Arden Eli Hill
You tell a joke and the joke is,
I lie to guys in chat rooms.
I tell them I have an eight inch cock
when its really nine,
and I laugh
The next joke is,
Sometimes I tell them I use to have a nine inch cock
but now I have nothing.
This time I don’t laugh at the joke.
Your voice is as low as mine,
your chest as flat as mine,
your cock a mystery I can’t compare my flesh to.
The word nothing stuck in my throat like a something
What if I said nothing.
What if I said sex-reassignment surgery is not that funny.
Besides, it reforms the penis into a clit and a cunt
and no one with a clit and a cunt considers them nothing.
What if I said nothing, instead remembered
Louisiana, the rain when I was a child,
taking off my clothes, and wondering if I was a seal
because of the way water curved down my body,
because I wasn’t a boy, because I couldn’t be a girl.
What if I said something?
What if I told you what it’s like
to suck the cock of a boy
who pulls his cock from the dresser drawer
slips it down his pants out the fly
and jokes about an instant hard on?
In a joke you say the word nothing.
What if I tell you the boy is a boy like me?
You tell a joke and everyone
in the room laughs but me.
Silence draws your eyes to mine.
The word, nothing, is something
I can’t let go of. I remember
the lover I held after surgery,
how when she healed I slipped into her cunt
and sucked on her clit until she came.
What if I tell you nothing
of what happened next?
Everything I did to her body,
she did to mine.
What if I tell you I have a nine-inch cock
and an eight-inch cock and a seven-inch cock
an every increment you can by at the store inch cock?
What if I write about my cock
right after I write about my cunt?
What if I is the orb that sees,
the flesh made word,
the flesh made space
the silence made flesh?
What if I the poet,
the persona, the he, she, they, we?
Where will you
be listening from?
What will you believe?
What if it’s nothing?
Arden Eli Hill’s publishing credits include Willow Springs, Slow Dancing to Invisible Music, and the Lambda Literary Award winning anthology, First Person Queer.
Lesbian Studies, By Mary Merriam
O my muse, promiscuous muse, my bunny,
hop off paper, hop in my arms, my darling
muse not mine, my everyone muse, please let me
touch and amuse you.
Now the past is sliding away, past harm’s way,
past the nightmare hidden in sex’s dream, when
you, in need, decided to strip and show your
body to die for.
Naked, word hot, here are your breasts, I’m breathless
writing this, yes throbbing and flushed, your memoir’s
pictures move me far from a text perusal,
write me, I’m lovesick.
Mary Meriam is most proud of her first book of poems, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman); her Sapphics version of a poem by Sappho, published by Literary Imagination (poetry editor, Marilyn Hacker); and her sonnet about waltzing with Julie Andrews, which was a finalist in A Prairie Home Companion’s Bed of Roses Love Sonnet Contest and read on National Public Radio.
The supplement continues at windycitytimes.com/lgbt/Our-Fifth-Annual-Pride-Literary-Supplement-Page-Four/18758.html.