Sapphics IV | As Any Foolish Woman | Sapphics with Fragments from Simone Weil

Sapphics IV

may, not quite rural indiana. summer
coming for us—june bugs, cicadas screaming.
we ordered gatorade margaritas &
      double vegas bombs

at a bar where patrons still smoked inside, ash
& water stains on sticky amber wood. we
drank like we drank cinnamon oat lattes—fast,
      heavy eye contact.

i’d already planned for a man to take me
home, a choice i regretted when she took me
by the hand to the bathroom stall, her finger
      pinned to my lips.

outside, the low thump of top forty singles,
dull & voiceless through two sets of metal doors.
i was too drunk to feel how carefully she
      touched me, how quickly

i let her pull my top down. it was true, what
they said about instinct—my body told me
where to kiss her, what to do, how to ignore
      our phones buzzing

behind the toilet. hours later, the man
came in his jeans & let his weight rest half-on,
half-off my torso. he kept saying so good
it was so so good.

he made me let him give me a ride home. he’d
given me walgreens chocolates the week before.
he wasn’t a bad man & there was nothing
      bad between us, just

snapchats & text messages, barely flirting.
neither of us noticed my little stumble
at the back door, the trip that nearly split
      my toenail in two.

---

As Any Foolish Woman

“Curse God, and die.” Job 2:9b

turns out god doesn’t care about queers either
way—the words man & woman don’t appear in
genesis one. more like earthling. more like
      being from the ground.

i don’t think my old pastors really knew hebrew.
they liked greek & the gospels & talking
about the time they managed the little caesar’s
      in michigan city.

here’s what i want to tell them now: their pit stains
during the ten thirty service were just as
distracting as an imaginary woman’s body
      behind a pulpit,

just as disruptive as a woman’s mouth made
into the mouthpiece of god. i don’t know what
a woman is anymore, but as a girl,
      i knew my body—

the fact of it—was a problem it was my
responsibility to solve. i want to
tell them about phyllis trible & the time
      jesus called himself

mother hen. all these men who liked to preach our
need for salvation, god’s mercy, their gift of
intercession. they always chose the boring,
      obvious parts: paul

reasoning with a scared, hungry crowd, selling
not bread or fish but metaphors of a cruel,
distant love—parables to keep them neither
      satisfied nor safe.

---

SAPPHICS WITH FRAGMENTS FROM SIMONE WEIL

life, i’ve decided, will be long for me. for
years, i divided myself into segments,
raw & meaty as two ends of a severed
      earthworm caught on the

sidewalk after a night of heavy rain. halved,
we went on living. wounds scabbed over & time
clung to what we needed to survive. after,
      imagination

filled my empty spaces & was, in essence,
a liar. i waited for something—for god,
death, consolation, anything other than
      my lonesome double,

my counterweight, my phantom prize. now, we’ll go
on living forever—my selves suspended,
my mysteries of faith. biune, holy, our
      universe is full.

Caitlyn Alario is a queer poet from Southern California. A Teaching Fellow and doctoral student at the University of North Texas, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in Classics and Humanities from Valparaiso University. Her work has appeared in Third Coast, Vallum Magazine, Annulet, and elsewhere.