Luster

by Raven Leilani

Here’s a fact: I have great breasts, which have warped my spine.

“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.

He has this smile as he does it that gives me the impression he is aware of himself, and it makes me want to sit on his face.

Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.

I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve.

and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope,

out, living on a diet of cream soda and Greek men.

I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit.

Spite is more sustainable. It gives you something to prove,

The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact. They were dying inside their own bodies, and now all these dead components are my inheritance.

In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.