I Don’t Get Reverse Cowgirl
I get that I'm supposed to feel more feminist
or whatever, but the thing I don't understand
is what I'm supposed to be looking at: Eggshell
wall molding? Unwashed laundry pile towering
a cornered basket? Unclipped cuticles on hairy
foot shivering over mattress cliffside edge? Or
more pertinent, I think: What’s so damn great
about the back of my head, anyway? What makes
it a preferable alternative to my face? Not
to sound boastful or anything, but my face
is why I imagine someone would want to fuck
me in the first place. That is, of course, unless
the real fantasy was less kinky cattle prods
and assless chaps and more like what happens
at the end of Old Yeller, or to poor, dumb Lennie
in Of Mice and Men. Way back in the 8th grade,
I thought people called it a “blow job” because
you’d wrap your mouth around it like a pistol
and wait. While we’d debate in English class
about whether George was more merciful
or cruel, I’d fold my face down into my desk
and imagine that good, dark night full of rabbits,
my cold cheek grazing lacquer wood surface like
a soft dirt mound alongside an abandoned road
or a stranger’s pillowcase. When I’m older, a guy
I sleep through the summer with shares the secret
to the best blow job of his life: It’s how much she
“liked it,” and I think “How the hell do you know
what girls like when you shove fingers in my mouth
and won’t look in my eyes when you fuck me,” and I go
sour, reckon this bastard must not have the stomach
to watch my lights go out, but still wants to feel
the warmth of my blood on his knuckles. Maybe
I just don't know how people “enjoy” things, or
I don't consider enough that men will do whatever
they must to me in order to sleep at night. But if
it was me in a shootout, and the noon was high,
I’d want someone to pull their trigger and be done
with me, unless I really got to be the one packing
heat in the saddle, slicking a line of cans off
a fencepost with a single bullet. Like, let me pull
your hair, fill your belly with hot lead. I want to hold
a wild body between my thighs and reach above
my head, brush the moon’s warm, low-hanging
udder. I want my Swarovskis and spurs, a lasso
and some horns to grip. I want someone to knock
my boots and give it to me, baby, their best damn
shot. So do it, cowboy. Go on: Give me the gun.
My Mother Wouldn’t Let Me Draw on My Skin
But she compromised with refillable vouchers
for at least two tans a week at Golden Cheeks
Sugar-Wax Studio, provided I kept up my straight
-A streak and behaved. “You’ll get ink poisoning,”
she’d argue, “or worse, ideas,” as if my imagination
wasn’t already as patchworked and full as a sleeve,
as if I’d never spent a study hour etching smiley
faces or ivy vines into any bare, dime-sized space
of skin I could hide under the distress of my jeans
instead of the standard list of Spanish conjugations
or theorems Pythagorean in nature. The other girls
in my grade were smarter than me. They knew all
about boys, girls, and how to wear a miniskirt just
long enough to dodge the dress code. I’d witness
them beat a mean face in the dim light of a dingey
bathroom sink before 7 AM–egg-shaped beauty
blender in one hand, bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos
clenched in the other–then watch them break out
into a fake-jog down the hall at the shrill ringing
of the first period bell. They’d microdose spritzes
of cherry blossom body spray between Power Point
slides pertaining to the water cycle, swap lip glosses
and scrunchies around circular lunch tables at which
I was too unfortunate to be seated. But what I admired
the most about them was how they’d clique up around
the locker room after P.E., push over a shirt collar or
roll up a pant leg, and compare their own pale suntan
“tattoos,” or rather various shapes imprinted by sweat
-proof tanning stickers they all seemed to know how
to ask for. I’d catch glimpses of stars and hearts, covet
my own butterfly sticker-print tramp stamp or Playboy
bunny brand on a hipbone, an ass cheek. It was more
than mere materialism or idolatry to me. I’d think: Oh,
to be so young and self-discerned, so aware of the body’s
essential capacity for obscuring icons from our teachers
or our mothers. As I tried to avoid eye contact with a VHS
tape documenting the “miracle” of birth in health class,
I’d attempt to count the secrets I’ve ever tried to carry
on my body. The amount was less than the square root
of not enough. So in preparation for my next appointment,
I pressed a daisy between the pages of my biology textbook
and snuck it into my tanning bed. I laid it against my rib
cage to fit just so under my bra band, just so I could lift
my arm and admire its silhouette in the mirror. I watched
as a part of me faded every day that it did. Even so many
years later, I’ll wake up tracing where the petals used to be
on my skin with my fingers, so phantasmal, but still there
somehow. And now that I’m grown, I can begin to imagine
what kinds of ideas my mother was so afraid that I’d have,
if they were all that different from the thoughts I normally
have about the artificial banana smell of our bronzing lotion,
if it smelled anything like a fruit-flavored condom, how it
might taste. What can I say? It's not in me to deny myself
my pleasures. As much as I want to, as much as I’ve tried.
Jacklin Farley (she / they) holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida State University and a BA from the University of Arizona. Their work is forthcoming in Blood Orange Review and Water~Stone Review and has appeared in Moon City Review, WUSSYMAG, Cola Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Oakland Arts Review, and other places. You can find them on Instagram and Bluesky