Jessica Abrego is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College and is a member of the campus spoken word performance group WORD. Here is a glimpse into her perception of relationships.

the smallness of beds

transparent gossamer threads connect me tenuously to myself
then, simple silver scissors snip
strings thin enough to be
invisible and i am
lost

unconscious animal i sleepwalk over manic days and
dance haphazardly under anonymous nights
eyes glaze over opalescent
i blind myself to the sight of
bodies
piled knee deep on the bedroom floor

Cause of death? They were dead on arrival.
indiscriminate slash and
burn

but, these are not days of mourning, only days of
shoveling
of
cleaning out rotted limbs and sweeping the floors of
discarded hair.
i am cold
i am calculating
you are not my children
i am not responsible for you

you are
men

why do i try to
shield your perceptions?
protect you from my
ravenous licention and
the reality of a woman
unhinged
and
undressed?

mornings after always dawn dark and i
collect my broken bits asserting
you can not take the shattered fragments of me and
divide them up like
pieces of broken mirror to gaze at yourselves with
or
trim the rope or with
slit your wrists with

i am still mine
self possessed i am
no mans possession to break or keep or give away

but
it’s an irrelevant distinction because i
stand shivering on shady street corners
handing out those shards myself
dividing my time and letting you
cut lines of hallucinogenic sex and snort them off my
flesh

i say that i hate to sleep alone, that these
narrow beds feel cavernous in the cold
but
nameless warmth you cant
provide me company only
heat of skin pressed close enough to feel my heart pound but not
close enough to hear the sound of my
silent protests against
mutual misuse and
self abuse

vortex,
shades of faces, arms and abdomens flash
lacking recognition and demanding extra minutes
extra moments
more time
more attention
mounting monumental until i
turn off the lights and close my vision

lights on
rip off the printed paper lamp shade and
burn my retinas on a bulb laid bare and naked.
to expose to me
the things i
have to
see

my bedroom
is stacked knee deep in bodies and
shoveling limbs is akin to a
pesky problem set

How did i get here?
who have i become, i wonder on these
anonymous november nights
so far from home
far from
everything i thought that i had known

i cycle endlessly between two points of flux

Point 1:

My third and forth parents are secularity and public schools
i was taught that following rules meant
using a condom and
enquiring about STDS before and after every new partner.

“the fairer sex” a moniker uncalled for we could
work like men
we could learn like men and
feminist foremothers faught so we could
fuck like men.

Abstinent flower of modesty wilted by
bra burning and
a yearning to be
free and easy in all manners of being means that

if there’s a fire between my thighs then i’m
perfectly within my rights to put it out
however i fit

so
do it
do it
do
it

and don’t
worry about your reputation numbers are just
tally marks scratched in your mind, easily rubbed out or
denigrated to the importance of a simple
clerical
record

Point 2:

this sexual revolution
feels more binding than a corset ever could have
what if i just want to
kiss someone and
politely call it a night what if
fucking like a man feels like more pressure than
release and
honestly
if his balls are blue thats something he and his
left hand can work out on their own.

at this point i
beg him to just go home
go home
go home

before i remember that in
denying him my “prize” i also
deny myself
pleasure
agency
and the legacy promised to me by those
righteous feminist foremothers to whom i
meant so much

so

whats it going to be
1 or 2
1 or 2
me and you or
me and
you?

State of Sin, or The Portrait of a Summer
I’m reading Kerouac and smoking small cigars
I’m sitting outside on second floor porches and
watching inherited cinema
I drank a grass of yerba mate and two glasses of
red wine, nearly slept with a man who’s
nearly twice my age

The gray paint on this porch is peeling off in generous, wide sheets
separating from wood gone blank and colorless with age
I see
The years peeling back behind the paint and I
Peel back the layers of the last few nights

I don’t miss him
the funny thing is
I don’t miss him.
What a great man, rather a
Good Boy.
But he isn’t funny, no
and he isn’t romantic or wild
I need a reckless sort of man, for now
A man with electricity behind his eyes and blazing
blue-hot fire in his gut
A man with raw, unfiltered passion coursing thick through
his veins a man with
poetry on his lips and soft and vulgar
sex on his tongue
His teeth should be white, like that boys, but
freer to bite, unleashed to consume me
whole
He never consumed me, never
ate me alive with his dirty talk or rushing
hands. I need a man with hands that will scoop me up and pop me in a pocket and not mind when I tear my way out through the flesh of his leg,
instead of the fabric of his pants
I need a man who will entertain fantasies of French boulevards
nakedness in dark alleys
and barefoot strolls on city streets
A man who will travel over miles to see a wisp of my hair
caught on a fencepost

Summer is a state of sin, I said into the telephone
this skin I’m in stretches taut over
curves known to be dangerous
I need a man who, despite the signs, is willing to take the drive
at 90 miles an hour like Hunter S. Thompson, tripping on acid
his dick should never be flaccid and
his chains should already be rusted in a box somewhere because he
broke them years ago.

summer is a state of sin, I said again
this skin I’m in stretches taut over curves
marked and
known to be dangerous
Lately I’ve been entertained by thin white tubes of poison
between brown fingers with nails polished violent red
I reach out in the middle of the night and grope
for her anonymous warmth

I held a woman in my arms and she was
dark, and soft
She smelled like warm weather and she asked nothing of me
We danced like
two crazed animals and consumed each other in a yellow taxicab.
We ate ripe, ruby strawberries and
watched the juice drip thin
from each other’s mouths
Her shoulder rested
small and round against me in the morning
and I collected
photographs of her eyelashes and hairline in my memory
I felt
the way a man must feel when he wakes up with me in his arms
Masculine and heady from the wine and the night
from the stars that fell blazing from the sky when I was
in his bed.

maybe I don’t
need a man at all
maybe I just need
to feel my own skin stretched taut
under summer’s heavy sky and capture
photographs of
brown shoulders and hairlines
in my mind

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 6:03 am and is filed under Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.