Sandra Simonds

My Sexuality Is “Victim of Capitalism"

My gender is pink jeans. My sexuality is longing
and taking that longing
down the long, red dawn
spread like a fan
across the bed. I don’t think
I’m gay. I don’t think I’m straight.
I think I’m going to change into my pussy
is always wet these days as if Eros
itself had taken up permanent residence
in the stupid garage of my body.

My pussy doesn’t believe
in ecological collapse or
trees or the sunset; it doesn’t believe in the moors,
the Brontes, the heart
or the landscape opening and closing
like a fist. It can’t resist. It just keeps going
going like a machine
placing its bets like an idiot
on a rigged game.

I’ve made a few babies.
I built them from some cross between
revolution and youth like a girl
who has the word “fate” tattooed
on her forearm because she can’t
stand anything and the act
denotes her lack of intelligence
which is sad but real.

Yesterday, at a birthday dinner
someone was talking about Rumi,
some fable
that involved a lion
and a woman. Something abstract was stacked
on seven Korans. Maybe it was Eros or
love or the sun. I can’t remember.

 But something about the story
moved my flesh like light against
the crescent moon
and I wondered, Alex, if you too wanted
to make a spirit
out of this nothingness,
an ash spirit, trash everywhere trash,
and fling it across the hotel
window to make reality
a scene before us.

Sandra Simonds is the author of Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been included in Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Fence, Granta, Lana Turner, and Poetry. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

Rodrigo Toscano's newest book of poetry, Explosion Rocks Springfield, is just out from Fence Books. His previous books include Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities.  His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Voices Without Borders, Diasporic Avant Gardes, Angels of the Americlypse, Imagined Theatres, In the Criminal’s Cabinet, Earth Bound, and Best American Poetry. Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers and the National Institute for Environmental Health Science. Toscano lives in the Bayou Saint John Faubourg of New Orleans.