Restless and I can’t stand to be so
stuck in the dunes of my own demise,
shadowy slopes of emptied hourglass sand and
I am running out of something.
(Time, words, the joint in my hand still cherried).
What more can I write about longing?
Nemesis to my Narcissus,
my ashes to Athens
& ruinous Rome—
Greek to me is nothing
more than ego death and reflecting pools.
So tragedy goes
& so do I.
Aimless and untoward,
my compass wanton.
Lost as I am in the shapes of our togetherness,
the triangle of freckles on your chest.
I miss you more than I know you
and I know you more than I know myself
(these days, anyway).
Is poetry not the most self-flagellating form of confession,
kneeling in the temple of my own lexeme?
One cannot seek absolution in their own anxieties!
How foolish I am! How foolish I have always been!
So remember me as a fool.
Remember me as hopeless, as romantic, as goddess, as God.
But remember me, first, as a lesbian.
As carpetmuncher/fingerbanger/homo/dyke.
As other otherworldly, undone by pleasure,
pumping throbbing aching pulsing and
as girl on girl, fucked and fucking,
curve and breast and bush and knoll,
dripping howling sucking gasping.
Do not elegize me in ambiguity.
Do not take away my girl, my baby.
Do not make me suffer any more longing.
I am complete. Remember me as whole.
Hannah Fradkin is a cultural studies graduate student at Claremont Graduate University. She’s a dyke Jew feminist who lives in California with her fiancée, Becca, and their cat, Chloe.
