*After What Women Want by Kim Addonizio
Dear Readers,
It’s done, and so I want a red dress to walk around on the arm of a woman. I want it cheap so that its peeling hurts. Tight, so I wear it and in a fit tear it, or someone tears it off my chest. I want it careless and backless and like my back, backless so they wonder, what. the. hell. is. going on, underneath. I want to knock around crossroads until my heels break, buy berries, buy everything I never needed. Pass past the cowhide market, they're filthy as fuck, slinging cows onto a dolly, dreaming of toying with me on a sticky truck while on their shoulders hoisting skin and blood. But no, I walk the walk of a cool astronaut, like I want to walk. But it’s never enough, and I want that red dress bad. I want it to tell me, no one is OK with it, their worst fear about me, a sickness in their stomach pit. To show them how little I care about them or anything else except what I’m drinking next. Do or die, I want, and when I find it, I’ll pull that body off its hanger, random against other bodies, sail this planet full of ghosts, and wear it like bones, like cries, like smoke wrapping a leaving light.
Yours,
A fucking mess.
Mai Serhan
Mai Serhan is a writer, editor and translator. She holds a BA in English & Comparative Literature and MA in Arabic Literature from the American University in Cairo, as well as an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. She is the winner of the Narratively Memoir Prize forReturn is a Thing of Amber, and the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award for her collection,CAIRO: the undelivered letters.
