I once spent a season fucking a big game hunter.
I could kill a deer.
I could skin one.
But still I was afraid to ask for touch
afraid to name all my parts.
like skinning a rabbit, poems and silence were easier. Poems let you practise your voice, they can be revised, critiqued, re-revised again and again. But even if you are a slut, a deer who would for every hunter in the woods, it can still make you blush to say:
I want you
desperate groping in the dark
I want to get lost in your forest
we ate the things he killed and I began to understand the necessities of violence.
we ate each other too, devoured each other, sucked blood to the skin, preformed extravagant excesses in vivisection. pinned down and open from moonrise to dawn I learned that it takes more courage to be honest about what you want, to leave scraps of yourself in the brambles like tufts of fur, that it takes more skill to see all the small lives in the forest than it does to kill a deer.