Margaret Price

FLESHLY SCHOOL

We are not imagining your cock.
It bobs between us, real as speech or air.
Nothing is invented when we fuck.

Others might believe it's merely talk:
a shibboleth, a careful joke we share.
But we are not imagining your cock.

Make a fist, or strap it on. Our luck
to know it doesn't matter what you wear.
Nothing is invented when we fuck.

It's not verisimilitude we seek,
nor riposte, redemption, nor repair;
for we are not imagining your cock.

Let them think it has to do with lack,
dissimulation, something we must bear.
Nothing is invented when we fuck.

We don't fabulate, nor yearn for fact...
only harness what was always there.
We are not imagining your cock.
Nothing is invented when we fuck.

* * *

FIST

Stamina becomes a craft:

muscle, knuckle, sinew, speech.
Terrors turn like loosened screws.

I have nothing to repay you
but my nothing: all my losses,

all my holes, cracks, my want.

Probe, and you might feel this drove
of mouths envelop you, might hear

from inside
when they call.

Margaret Price is an assistant professor of writing at Spelman College. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ms., Creative Nonfiction, Breath & Shadow, and Bitch. She is at work on a book about psychosocial disability and academic discourse.