Luster

by Raven Leilani

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, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany

total disintegration of your hopes and dreams,

The inability of any man to compare

the quality is on par with that diabolical drugstore cocoa butter that leaves you ashier than before.

I smile at her and try to pretend that she is not pro-life. I lean forward to show my engagement and try to summon the spirit of the Grateful Diversity Hire.

I have said goodbye enough times to know that departure has a way of gilding what are, at best, slow quotidian deaths, but still each time I think of everything I will lose.

where I listen to my roommate and her feminist boyfriend having very sweet communicative sex.

masters of the double consciousness,

the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life.

I suddenly feel that she can go fuck herself, that my intellectual labor should be subsidized and the onus is not on the oppressed to consider the oppressor,

smells like it was scooped out of someone’s belly button,

every morning he had to put on his skin and adhere to a code of behavior he could no longer understand, a highly functioning collection of pathologies with shrapnel in his back.

Now I am different. I have learned not to be surprised by a man’s sudden withdrawal. It is a tradition that men like Mark and Eric and my father have helped uphold.

One moment the body is whole, and the next it is turned out like a rind.

body had ceased to be the sort of hard, inchoate thing you might call cute.

the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die.

so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.