i eat desire for breakfast
for Bernard Ferguson
.
hold me or hold me down. want me or don’t. hurt me
with your hands like knives, hands i have never loved
but have wanted every night for the past five years. i don’t lie
but i have wanted to lie with you. i think of you
in the loosest parts of the night, when the darkness rubs its face
against the edge of the sky, when i am about to fall asleep. last march
i sat on your bed and waited for you to come and sit beside me, the heat of the room
cooking us both. you undressed me. i slid you out of your sweat-stained t-shirt.
i put my hands on your shoulders,
felt your solidness underneath my fingertips.
you warned me not to leave any lasting marks.
even now i want you, if only to remind me that we are real, that we have bodies,
that our bodies can touch
even for a moment. you moved me the way you wanted me,
a doll with arms and legs. i bent and changed under your hands. i have never been
so happy. with your hands like knives, or possibly bullets
you touched me. now i burn with it. i eat desire for breakfast.
i want you to bruise, to bleed, to hurt me
to break me into the pieces i was made out of. i want you to leave
lasting marks.
Joanna Acevedo is the author of the poetry collection The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and the short story collection Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, forthcoming 2021). She is a Hospitalfield 2020 Interdisciplinary Resident, NYU Goldwater Fellow, and Prose Editor at Inklette Magazine. She is currently an MFA candidate at NYU.
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