Teeth in Hide

 

The three words arrive like a bailiff at the door

clutching a clipboard of expectations

a lease for the heart

signed in the blood of a thousand domestic silences.

But I am not a property for your portfolio

not a plot of dirt to be fenced and patrolled

not a garden for your exclusive aesthetic pleasure.

I love you is not a border guard

not a stamp in a passport

not a wall built to keep the world out.

It is the opening of the gate

the burning of the fence

the riot of the commons in the chest.

This is my body to fuck around with

to drag through the grit of the street

to offer up to the salt and the spit of the world.

I want the liquid maps of a stranger’s mouth

the raw geometry of all-night bed poems

the velvet friction of the unmapped.

I want to be a vessel for the hunger of the city

the scent of musk and asphalt etched in the sweat on my thighs

where the skin is a shared territory

not a private estate for you to mine the marrow.

I want the teeth of the night to leave marks

the kind that do not wash off in a domestic shower

the kind that prove the bone is still alive

and not just a leather binding for your story.

I want to be a riot in a torn slip

a ragged banner planted in the mud of a stranger’s bed

tasting the iron and the heat of a life you didn’t give me

and still know the way back to your side.

You use the word like a stone to mark the boundary

a way to keep the inventory of the heart from spilling into the gutter

but slut is just the sound of a fence snapping under the weight of the world.

It is the patriarchy’s ledger

the audit of the flesh

the desperate attempt to put a padlock on the sun.

I take the shame and I burn it for warmth

I take the slur and I hone it into a blade

to cut the strings of the puppet-show you call respectability.

A woman who cannot be shamed is a woman who cannot be owned

and a body that is a commons is a body that is finally, lethally free.

I carry the ghosts of women who were fenced in

who traded their spirits for a roof that leaked

who kept their knees together and their mouths shut

to survive the audit of the parish and the precinct.

I see them in the mud of the old camps

the ones the state tried to inventory out of existence

the women who were ruins before they were wives.

I owe it to their silenced blood to be feral

to be the vagrant you cannot evict from my own skin.

Every stranger I taste is a strike against enclosure

every mark on my neck is a debt repaid to the unlived

a fuck for every grandmother who died in the dark

with her desire still locked in a drawer like a stolen deed.

Because I love you is a choice made in the wreckage

not a contract of surrender.

I am an unfenced gut

a raw landscape of desire

and I choose to lie in our bed and feel the weight of your arm

and feel clean.

Not because I stayed behind the wire

not because I kept the passport stamped

but because I bring the smell of the street into our sheets

the scent of other skins and the grit of the pavement under my nails

and the return is the only revolution left.

I want to be bruised by the discovery of the world

to have the teeth of the street in my hide

and then walk back through your door

not as a fugitive

not as a thief returning stolen goods

but as a woman who loves you enough to leave

and loves herself enough to come back.

The revolution is not in the staying

it is in the right to wander and the grit of the choosing.

No more deeds.

No more handcuffs.

Just the raw heat of the return.