by Alina Stefanescu 

with the Beastie Boys

as in wreck with slow hands, trawling the shores of my flesh,
marking the depth of each breath against buoyant prebuttal

as in sinking the writing I’d rather be doing than rising to meet
the tendon of words he tongues up my back, irrefutable magic

as in deliberately damage muscles I tense against the gloss of girl mags
that train me to please Him & blow his mind through the roof of parked cars

as in cripple with assumed consent until the ghost of my foreign mother
appears in her rosebud nightie, eyes narrowed like terrible hallways

as in warning me never to fake an orgasm, never cartoon the stars
or falsify groans, never xerox a moan onto your face

as in destroy your ability to feel is the curse of the fakers
women whose eyes get stuck in the sticky jiggle appropriating jello

as in vandalize with one teensy lie that teaches him to read you
wrong, a lie he carries forward when he can’t finish a book

as in betray with tiny scissors by lying to a man you want inside
you while staging the other lie to smoke him out

as in ruin the best question to pose before an aching body
that adores his hands shaping the sky in patchwork puddles

as in lie: if I do, it is just to say I am still my mother’s daughter,
to say dear america, I can’t fake it to make it work.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her first poetry chapbook, Objects in Vases (Anchor & Plume Press) was the 2016 Poetry Book of the Year for the Alabama State Poetry Society. In 2018, her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Prize. Alina won the River Heron Poetry Prize in 2019. Her writing can be found in journals including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review. She is Poetry Editor of Pidgeonholes. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.