Of 2018's Peseroff Prize-winning poem, prize judge Lillian-Yvonne Bertram had this to say:
"In expertly crafted lines, "I Was Looking For Dick..." captures a snapshot of our millennial moment: the dating app. 'Everybody's....looking--& nobody needs/to ask for what.' In looking for companionship one finds an abundance of bodies yet a scarcity of understanding for the actual lived experience of the person. This poem makes me wonder not just what we are looking for, but who are we presenting ourselves to be, as a person who wants to be found?"
torrin a. greathouse
I Was Looking for Dick & All I Got Was This Lousy Poem
after danez smith
The phone app tells me I live
in a neighborhood of head
-less men. Their severed
throats whisper me a new
set of names: femboy, dick
-girl, tranny, victim. A man
asks me if I’m a sissy & I say
“Yeah,” thinking he means
like Sisyphus, right? Like,
none of us want to be here
rolling our boulderbodies
again&again&again&again
to the mouth of another
damp & willing cave. Wrong.
Instead, he is searching for
a convenient mythology,
old names for a new girl-god.
Another calls me trap & this
must be for all the door
he is imagining me, as if
by naming a thing, he can
make it swing open. Sometimes,
I wake to a picture of a man
his massive cock clenched
in his fist like a brutal key.
I mean, I imagine it would
leave me hingeless & painted
red with myself. He asks
if I want to fuck & I tell him
“Fuck is a word with such
untidy lineage. Some linguists
trace it to the Swedish fock
meaning penis, or the Dutch
fokken—to breed—or back
to the common Germanic
fuk, meaning to strike. & all
of these—cognates: trees
severed from the same root.
This is how we know language
was a temple built for men,
that one word can name sex,
lineage & weapon in the same
breath.” Sometimes, I wonder
why I still have this app at all,
its golden mask unblinking
every time I check my texts.
Seems like everybody’s profile
says looking—& nobody needs
to ask for what. The answer:
a body to bury themself inside.
This one time, a man told me
I bet u would look soo beautiful
as a boy & I said “I already look
like one’s ghost. All my curves
are chalk-lines. I took the boy
in my blood & buried him.
You are lusting after a flower
grown in that grave’s good dirt.”
torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer trans woman & cripple-punk from Southern California. Her work is published/forthcoming in POETRY, The New York Times, Muzzle, Poets.org, Redivider, BOAAT , Waxwing , & The Rumpus. They are the author of two chapbooks, Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods, 2017) & boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018). When they are not writing, their hobbies include awkwardly drinking coffee at parties & trying to find some goddamn size 13 heels.
poetry
prose
art
