Self-Portrait in Closet
Again I escape the sun’s wide hands. I slump into the old brown
couch. I open my screen, again. Again, the women. Again
my wanting. I could never watch the slick and drip
of their bodies without becoming taut, my body
a rubber band snapping against its own skin, unstopping.
Sometimes I’d pause just before their mouths met
or gasped, so I could study them forever pinched
in a moment of reaching. As though
they could be studied. Though it grew easier
to watch them knowing they couldn’t see me––
I would practice their moans, the sound sharp as hard candy
glancing off the edge of a jar, their sticky splinter. I thought
that if I could make a sound like that,
I’d startle open like a scab. The sting of it
the yes my body had learned without me,
the softest of yeses. In the mirror I unbuttoned my shirt
to see if my body would show me its yes. I wondered
if I could be pretty only when I didn’t want it.
Like when I saw a man watch me for the first time,
I was sure his eyes must be a yes my body didn’t know.
When I turned away he turned my cheek
back into his hand. He did not blink. Watched like that,
I felt brilliant as gums after pulled teeth. And when he reached
into me, my refusal churned in my stomach like a star. I turned
over as quick as I could. I pressed my nose into the pillow,
held it tight. My sweat stained his sweat; my bone throbbed
into bone. I breathed, exhale stabbed
into the pillow’s softness. I breathed. I could not see him.
Shakthi Shrima‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST, Muzzle Magazine, BOAAT, inter|rupture, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Tinderbox, amongst others. Shakthi Shrima has appeared or is forthcoming in her unmade bed. She reads for the Adroit Journal, and currently lives in Munich.