dick pics
Two dicks, sitting in my daughter’s inbox. Like men without hats, waiting for any door to open.
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Sighting a stranger’s penis used to be rare. Remember raincoats? Like a flash of lightning, like a scratch and win ticket – sometimes glittering knock-off watches, sometimes a sole flapping penis shivering in the electric air.
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An overcooked hotdog? An aborted fetus? A close-up of a thumb? Rolled baloney on a lonely deli plate?
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We have whole monologues for vaginas. But I can only imagine a penis as silent, which isn’t the same as listening.
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The lighting is never good. Harsh, taken in haste, no one ever drapes a dick in folds of linen,
the head never looks back, one pearl earring shining in stilled patience.
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On every tunnel, school yard, crumbling brick wall, a graffitied cock, standing on balls pointing to the night sky, like a fallen constellation.
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Women were for portraits, nudes lounging, stuffed into frames, luminous and arch. They were heads and breasts, and feet, and buttocks (though never speech). You must pay and cross a velvet rope to see them.
The penis stood alone, in filthy bars, and bathrooms, in wooded parks, in the shadowed alleys whistling a moon-white tune.
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Now every penis is everywhere. Like posters for a one-act play, plastered on every telephone pole, bench, building, on every mailbox, on your kitchen chair,
so that you have to push through piles of them, great snowdrifts of penises, just to reach across the room and tuck a stray hair back into your daughter’s braid.
Sarah Tsiang
