Issue 45: Spring 2019

Plenitude

If, in my one body, I’d a cock & pussy both

If, in my one body, I’d a cock & pussy both,

I wouldn’t use them arbitrarily, toggling

back and forth on whims. Instead I’d make

a calendar: my cock today,

le lendemain my pussy.

Not unlike,

you’ll say, how you flop from your cock

to your bumhole as the prime site

where your desire inheres—and now

you need a pussy too? Be satisfied

with what your butt can do.

Dysphoria, you’ll say, okay,

but that’s subjective, an access

of fluidness, confusion

that you feel sometimes; c’mon, admit

that craving to appropriate

a pussy (given all you have,

all your enormous privilege) is, frankly,

entitled—acquisitive.

I say: do you believe these things

are zero-sum? That when I claim dissatisfaction

with my cock alone, and voice a wish

to have a cunt also—do you think

this requires that someone lose their own?

As if the global store of cunts

were finite?

            

Ugh,

You’re just a man you’re playing games you’re co-opting you’re not a real—

 

I’ve seen you in the patriarchy

saw you at that club one night

The Patriarchy

nice tunes there

Did you see him

I saw him he was there

And now he wants to be a she? a they?

Ha ha ha

Ha ha

HA!

HA

HA!

Guys maybe we don’t need to laugh

HA HA—!

Folks folks folks folks folks folks.

I don’t make claims of membership.

I have no narrative to offer

where from childhood I conceived

I was a girl. To measure by the company

in which I felt at home, more likely I

believed I was a book. I know I felt

weak and enjoyed that, fetishized

my softness, vulnerability

before I knew them to be

coded female. But that’s still

not quite the thing.

The thing, my claim,

the whole of it, is just: I’d love to have

a cock & pussy. Interchangeable

to suit the day. And also would like gender

to be overthrown, and every woman

now alive & also every boi

to adore me, and these goals not to be

contradictory.

I don’t ask much.

I blink, demure.

Solicitously, I extend

my round bottom to you.

 

About the author

Daniel Karasik (they/them) is a writer and organizer in Toronto. “Plenitude” was a finalist in this year’s Writing in the Margins contest at Briarpatch Magazine, where their journalism on prison abolition and trans liberation also recently appeared. Another new poem is featured in, confusingly, Plenitude Magazine. They struggle for labour justice with the Fight For $15 and Fairness movement and volunteer with a restorative justice-based healing/rehabilitation program for former prisoners, among other community work things. They are also the author of some books, including a poetry collection, Hungry (Cormorant Books), and most recently the fiction collection Faithful and Other Stories (Guernica Editions).