Belle Cohen
Unbegun Sapphic Travels
In my mind I’m already halfway to New Mexico
This lucid dream staring at the pink soap in a gas station truck stop
bathroom and burning my fingerprints off
My dried up bleached out lint tangle of hair butchered on the linoleum
floor
My head is an ugly asymmetric egg but I don’t mind it
Because no man here needs to find me pretty
I don’t need to impress this urinal, I don’t need this halogen to want to
make love to me, I don’t need
In reality, I'm far away from the heat of New Mexico.
I’m in a city I can never afford to live in
I’m falling asleep on an older man’s couch, covered in my own hair
But I am so, so sick of telling that story.
No.
Instead this one, in my mind, I'm in truck stop making out with the
butchest truck driver off the exit for us highway 66 west
Her hair is soaked in motor oil and me
I evaporate out of every man’s house into a half drank cup of coffee in a
north Texas 7/11, I shrink into a soggy sugar packet pressed into the grout
I’m holy and unfinished
I fall asleep in greyhounds and under fingernails
I could be anyone
My body dances in Seattle rain and all I get is a dial tone
Somewhere in New Mexico I’m lighting a cigarette and swallowing it whole
Somewhere in New Mexico my mind is doing a parlor trick
I am turning this body inside out
I'm satisfyingly no appetite but my own.
“see this is exactly what I’m made of see? All these guts? All these pulsating
slimy things are the only things I always keep on me. I have nothing for
you.”
It's funny, at exactly the same time, my body is carried into an unmade bed,
half dressed.