Women Wear Clothes to Demonstrate Their Grief

Today my therapist suggested
I try lying down on top of graves

She had a leaf stuck to her cheek
But I didn’t tell her

I’m depressed
because my orgasms alone are uninspiring

And the most money I have ever made
was when I got hit by a car

My Wild Mind

my wild mind
will not let me cum!

Somewhere There’s a Nothing I’m a Part of

the status bar circles my iris

it isn’t insurmountable
or permanent

though, boundaries do exist

you don’t dissolve by going through them
and I went

are lovers people?

what I mean is
shit
wept from the gutter
is a kind of present

of desire of
the sexuality
of death

like, they control me
into me

but I am more
and other things

I am alive
so I stay up all night

enjoying feeling
sick with pleasure
I read Dolores O’Riordan’s natal chart
we have hardly anything
in common

I want to be more
than anything I want

if I listen carefully to certain music
I can just remember what it’s like
to live
inside the perfect closeness
of another’s breath

it seems extraterrestrial
in hindsight

Dolores said
I’ll miss you when you’re gone
and I think of this
while scraping 3-day-old smashed cockroach
from the sun-bleached wooden floor of my apartment

it’s like the refrain
or the stain of the refrain

I don’t pay it too much mind

there is real joy
in understanding

no one else is going to do it for you

I want so much long fake hair
and I want to win a dance off

I want to be disciplined
and prompt, I want

to cum
by barely even moving

desire really can be simple

Photograph courtesy of the author 

These poems are excerpted from Romance or The End, copyright © 2020 Elaine Kahn. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.