ON THE QUEER GIRL FANTASY

I say I love women & men’s faces crack open
like a jawless throat to swallow me

whole. They say, that’s hot. They’re thinking
sultry eyes, pay-for-more-action, queer

cured by cock. Body as sport. Eyes on everyone
but each other: a spectacle of choice.

Isn’t real unless a man is done proving he can
make a door out of an unopened envelope.

Question: if a girl kisses another girl with
no witness, does that revelation make a sound?

The catch in throat, trembling wrists, terror
blooming into wreathfuls of ribs, wearing

the future around her neck like a noose
— or the bullet caged behind front teeth

when gutted with a pistol in the mouth,
taught a woman’s place is with a cock

-ed gun in the belly if it won’t fire between
her thighs. The difference is when

the bleeding starts. Splintering drowned by
on-screen applause or dark-alley backhand.

I love women. I mean in the way that one
chooses her own murder over men.

Body softened with gasoline & ash. To be
unearthed by hands searching for rain

& crawl out of that grave into the story where
there’s no one else. Just her smile

set on bend of my skull, a coronet. Her eyelashes
the curve of two wings in flight.

I will always love her like walking into fire.
She will always be the kind of pretty so sharp

it feels like loving a knife.

By Natalie Wee

Biography:

Natalie Wee is the author of Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (Words Dance Publishing, 2016). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, and more. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and two Pushcart Prizes.