I love butches.
The muscles, the short hair,
The refusal to pick up
Where their mothers left off.
I especially love
The angle of a knee
Wearing its way out of a faded pair
Of 501’s,
Scraping the dirty floor of a dark alley,
Kneeling in the dark,
Suckling cunt.
My cunt.
My fingers can always find
A hold in that short hair–
Even a crew cut.
I just twine right down to the roots
So I can grab that head
And turn it to look at me,
Cunt juice smeared and shining
Across that James Dean jawline.
I’m a connoisseur of the practiced sneer
That says, “Look out I’m tough.”
A butch who has her pose down makes me smile.
“Darlin’,” I say, sliding through
The shadows at her back,
“How fine you are.”
I flex my claws, apply them gently.
To her neck, pick up the fabric
Over a nipple, and slice it open so
The teacup-sized tit peeks through.
I lick the fear off her neck and purr,
“I really don’t care
Who’s butch and who’s not
As long as I get to fuck you.”
I love butches
Because I’m the woman
Who takes up where their mothers
Were afraid to go.
I can’t resist the call of that
Deep, smoldering anger,
the girlboy who can never forgive herself
Until Mama relents and says
(Standing in a dark doorway,
Spraying herself with a perfume atomizer),
“Forget the old man.
Come to my bed tonight.”
Butches need my hands,
My mouth, my eyes,
Because I see, I handle, I bestow
The hard-on, the female phallus,
The sweet prick of androgyne
Forever erect at the service of women.
Understand me–
My tricks are butches.
not men, not boys,
Butches.
Even if they seem like boys
With female parts to you,
I know they are women.
And I am there for the part of them
That needs to be taken out of control–
Not with contempt,
Not as competition,
But as a reassurance, a reminder,
Of the body’s truth
Inside the fantasy,
The body that makes
All fantasies possible.
I am, after all, a lesbian.
I lust after beautiful women, and
Butches are the most beautiful women
In the world.
