ROBBIE B

(if i were to write in honor of Kathy A this would be where i would say so)

 

I am fourteen and I am filling up the water bowl.

I am taking off my shirt.

I am fourteen and I am telling my daughter about when I was twenty-two.

I am twenty-four almost twenty-five and I am telling you about when I was fourteen.

 

I missed you when you were fourteen. I thought about playing

chess with you and your boyfriend

but was better at cards so we didn’t ‘hang out’

 

Here I am

taking off my shirt the way

I always watched and wanted. I sit round with naked legs chest out.

 

No one is disturbed.

 

I am sixteen and I am a young man inside a young woman.

 

I am getting fucked every day on the rocks behind the neighborhood.

He doesn’t know he’s fucking a boy and I’m not

going to tell him. I don’t think he’ll ever find out.

 

I am nineteen and at a wedding he’s working.

His eyes are more beautiful than either of us deserve

I am twenty three and certain that

I am almost as beautiful as I was when I was fourteen.

 

I am twenty seven and I know that I peaked at nineteen.

I take pills again to get that body back but I’m not going to get anywhere without the weight.

 

I wonder if I can write from the point of view of anyone else.

 

I am twenty three and in love with the same

woman I was when I was nineteen.

My love for her is the single consistency these seven-teen years.

 

I write her and we exchange

smiling faces like these (:)) instead of emojis.

It has more tactility and is therefore more genuine.

 

I am angry with her

and suddenly I am a fourteen year old boy

again with a big-boy crush when she smiles towards me.

 

All day remembering kisses from the dream before

I don’t think of touching myself only how

Surprised I’ll be at the way she tastes.

Her mouth shocks in its motions and

I’ll know she’s waited just as I have

For one doesn’t kiss that way if one hasn’t prepared

 

I am fourteen and making out with the

Shower wall, practicing for my wedding night

when me and my hymn perform the ritual of washing

The others’ body with a bar of soap.

I wash this body with gel and mine

hands other than my own to touch me.

 

These were always your hands.

 

I beg to be put back in your body as if god herself had ripped me from your cage.

 

I am nineteen and I have been in love with you since I knew how to sing.

I cannot tell you how.

 

I am twenty-one and I fell in love with your laugh the day you came into the theatre late and I knew it was you who’d sat down in front of me because you laughed. I knew then that I knew your laugh and knowing that I knew your laugh either showed me that I was already in love with it or the knowing that I knew it (by heart) made me love it then.

 

Either way it was true

It was true that that moment is the moment I knew I was in love with your laugh.

 

I am fourteen and sucking my first cock. I think I am drunk

or he is either way of truth it is dark and he is large and it is not a card game.

He is a large man and so am I (I am fourteen and I am beautiful)

and I do this because the best friend who is a whore tells me it is time I learn to be a whore too.

She is in the other room that is her bedroom having sex (she is sixteen or she is seventeen)

and tells me it is time I learn what to do.

 

Or maybe this is fabricated and she tells me to have fun or tells him to have fun with me or gives me another wine cooler and tells me to cool him off with my pretty little mouth.

 

I suck myself down.

 

He lays himself big in the middle

beneath an unused fire place and somehow my mouth—

made up that she said something to me like “it’s time” because I didn’t want—

He didn’t force me I forced myself

and the only reason I can cum to is to please her.

 

The first time I put a dick in my mouth was to please a woman.

See? I have loved you from the beginning.

We are told to stay in our lane, which applies most of the time to those overreaching White men and women claiming experiences that they’ve stolen. But the forms of traditional literature and traditional plot and Traditional. Models. Of. Time. are tired. Not my lane. What we have been forced to swallow as “normal” is Oppression. Normal is Patriarchy Normal is talk the way I want you to or I am going to put you away (I will not publish you).

This writing is my way of entering the conversation about multi-generation trauma. The pathology of mental illness has plagued almost every member of my family. I have the opportunity to heal wounds of my ancestry. And I am responsible to create the limits of safety for such an undertaking.

Sex was my first addiction. My madness. My coping. Bodies are alive. We are not each others medicine. We are not each others. My healing is belonging to myself. That to share my yummy voice and delicious flesh is a choice. A choice I get to refrain as many times a day as I want. No one taught me my body was my own or that my voice was my privacy. And the women I moved towards through literature taught me the flinging out into space of myself was my duty. My lineage is a stern madame. I am here for her.

Robbie B

I was raised by horses and hawks down near the Rio Grande. My writing is obsessed with women. We explore new denominations of the femme voice as an active and heroic song. I talk to goddesses and ghosts in remus, so that they will continue to protect and guide my mouth. My dog is my savior.