Tender

In my family, we talk about sex at the dinner table.

Over the meals my stepfather orchestrates, a kind of making love, my mother casually enquires who I’m fucking these days. The answer is always the same:

a pretty boy with lighter skin than mine           racehorse ribbed, all straining torso
throat and fingers          greyhound delicate     a boy built to race inside me.

—

After dinner, my mother and I take care of the dishes together—I wash; she dries.
I have come home from college with pierced nipples. She shakes her head.

Piercings are a sub thing, she says.

So is rough sex, the dinner table talk kind, but only if you bear the badges
of your passion with you after, shameful, on your skin.

—

I have made use of the ball gag she gifted me when she left the scene.
I have used it to quiet the catholic schoolboy who never stops talking.
He is a year older than I am.

When he arches his back,        the bone cage        under his chest ripples    his skin
like clear water. I can’t help    imagining him    beautifully quiet          and drowned.

—

In the attic chest:

               leather coils nesting like snakes
               she keeps to remind herself that men
               cannot hurt her anymore.

With these implements of pain and pleasure, my mother kept sex strictly professional. For a decade, she beat men in expensive soundproof rooms.

She has shown me the 10-page questionnaire potential clients would fill out.
She never worked with men who admitted to fantasizing about their mothers.

—

Her first husband was not my father.

—

Her first husband was the first man I called “daddy.”
He touched my body with such tenderness, it almost wasn’t wrong.
(Almost.)

—

The sex we talk about at the dinner table is always the consensual kind.

—

After the divorce, I saw my mother’s first husband

               every other weekend
                              and on alternating holidays.

                              There is some dispute over what happened in the bathtub.

—

I never asked

               i. the thoroughbred boys,
               ii. the racehorse boys,
               iii. the boys with slender canine bones

to touch me gently. I found the teeth in their hungry mouths.
With sullied hands I sought their sharpness.