6.13 / Queer Two

Femme Body Bop (Become)

1.

Into and entered I bend,
just-discernible shape.
Features something to comment on: eyes small, small
nose, the mole on the left breast.
Was a body.

2.

Streetlights trembled
as we marched back the night
trembled! we were so fucking fierce.
But couldn’t shake
my traitorous
yearning for pink
eyelet smock.
Where under lights
could there be and also?
The stunning curve?
Longing
penetration,
I painted my face
in a lovely
fuck you.

3.

Become body. It was full-limbed and pliant.
Sometimes, it betrayed me.
Other times, it leaps into fire. It becomes foolish
to say body/self as if separate.
My hand shields against sun. In the ocean,
in the wash fantastic. Body in water, the buoyancy.

Flesh happens, fast and unnameable. Can’t explain
how time opens like sex. Was a body, became body.
A full-blown moon-shine of sexy, fast to slick and lap
salt tides and tender. No need for explanation.

4.

Sweet-flesh and breast, my wrist says
woman. And the back of my knees say desire.
And my face says beauty, beauty, beauty. I choose
seven brushes, each with its own task –
sweep and buff. Glow.
And your lips say
yes to want’s whole and my fist
curls around the ribbon, grosgrain shimmer. We birth this:

femme in a marvelously glittered bed.
Femme in a marvelously bedded girl – all the way in,
and the vibrator. And the porn on TV.
And push-up bra on the floor.
See this trembling. Come
so hard mascara smears
butter-soft sheets – come so hard I cry.

5.

The wet tips. She finds
my cunt I find hers, but she does not sleep through the night.
The genders shift, restless in the sheets. They kick their feet
and four a.m. arrives. We exhaust in our definitions. Body
in multiple iterations, prounouns unpronounceable.

I have waded so far into this moment of sex –
can hold on, perhaps forever. I do not become
an anymore girl. I become feather, become spike.


Tamiko Beyer is the author of bough breaks (Meritage Press, 2011), and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, H_ngm_n, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She is a former Kundiman Fellow, founding member of Agent 409 (a queer writing collective in New York City), and a contributing editor to Drunken Boat. Tamiko received her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Find her online at wonderinghome.com.