flesh.
I wish people don't think of me as
a sex-obsessed freak,
another queer with queer desires.
What I want is not the simple flesh,
not the ground of someone's skin.
I have the love that succumbs,
I have the connection that rages,
I have the sentimental ‘how was your day?’
even thousands of kilometers away.
It's an urge to have someone
strip my skin from my flesh,
to peel like a rind that’s clean
and yet in the way.
The flesh, the most horrific,
the most tender, the most vulnerable part of me.
The one that bleeds, truly,
the one that gushes out of me like a hidden miracle.
It’s not just the yearning for flesh that I desire
from them, nor from myself.
It’s the urge to stab fingernails into the flesh
of a fruit,
to see it bruise and bleed and wounded,
and to not follow through,
because they know.
they know that my flesh
will remember them.
shreya(s) is a queer assistant professor of English. They write (mostly) queer fanfiction and the occasional lesbian yearning in original fiction.
