after Frank Ocean
You kept looking at me like you wanted to touch me
I thought it would be worse: the seams of my body
tearing in secret, an addendum unfiled, unfiltered
The way my body hurts doesn't require anything from you
means nothing needs nothing
is like that long wailing whale sound,
only from inside me, and sliced into fragments
thinner than a tooth, but just as wary and vibrating at a frequency
you can't touch, spiralling, but too slowly
to even notice, a broken orbit, an okay metaphor
for the stretching and thinning
is rain
is glitter
is rain
Not always pretty, but full of tongues and
girls and whichever slices of me you'd like to see,
the same crimped guts you've come to expect,
shaded swirl, something ruined about my face
I wanted to be cornered
JESSE RICE-EVANS is a queer Southern poet and rhetorician based in NYC. Read her work in Heavy Feather Review, Yes Poetry, tenderness yea, and in the chapbooks The Rotting Kind (Ghost City Press) and Soft Switch (Damaged Goods Press), among others. She's a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing at the City College of New York and the Cooper Union.
You kept looking at me like you wanted to touch me