Look at the clouds in the sky featuring

me, me, me and my many mistakes.

 

I was the one who bought their lies online in the movies at the mall

Buy two tenents get the third, free

 

Tenets of the school of heterosexual girls

 

1. it’s okay to drink the blood of boys and men
2. subvert your own pleasure to avoid pain
3. dehumanize subject and object, and repeat

 

 

 

I was the one who thought lightning, the kind you see in het porn

full of its valley inhabitants, was the only spark.

 

I was the one who sent the idiotic email to the muse:

you are amazing

 

or I am here waving, drowning

in the preordained dead sea of sex.

 

I was the one who married the two wrong men;

the one who bled on the published poet’s floor pillow.

 

I was the one gone, flipping over

the seal in a sea of oil.

 

I was the one who spent a life’s work on worry.

I was the one who learned that evading authenticity

 

drains marrow from the bone .and that the shiny black rock

in the center of the heart is meant for a ring you can put on another finger.

 

I bought the plot of heterosexuality and then closed the book.

 

***

Rachel Tramonte lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her partner and their two daughters.   Her poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, GFT, The Alembic, Jelly Bucket and other journals and magazines.