“Maybe you could write a memoir!”
an agent suggests a client suggests a professor a friend
another writer
a chaplipped mouth
money & booklists oversalting its tongue
You’re in demand! 9.8/10 tight cunt, cute ass,
“the emergent field of Sex Work Studies,”
the crumpled dollars of a live! nude! girl!
an agent soliciting me in my Twitter DMs
after a viral tweet & oh!
you’re a sex worker! & oh! you’re mixed race! Oh you’re bisexual
& oh! So it goes
it doesn’t matter
what you write
when it’s already written you
it’s enough for a day of darlinghood
a night at the Standard Hotel
where there are parties for the two workers
where they their friends their publishers argue
which was the first
the real first
the original sex worker writer!
when they began publishing in 2019
These days, everyone is a sex worker writer
because everyone wants to claim sex worker
to boast some precious wound
a dinner date is a sex worker
a go go dancer is a sex worker
an erotica writer is a sex worker
a sperm donor is a sex worker
the palm trees imported to California are sex workers
and I watched them tousle their leaves in the wind
while the wild fires burned Paradise to oblivion
(oblivion is not a sex worker but a madam
but a madam is a sex worker too)
the way, if you think about it,
a wife is a sex worker,
or a knife is a sex worker, as it cuts the meaning
of our lives into everything
into nothing
into confetti of a party for the whores
to clean up after in the morning
when I’d take the C home in Brooklyn
wearing a designer dress, my one dollar coffee gone cold
taking a photo of myself reading Gayatri Spivak
ask if the subaltern can speak
and taking 24 pages to say no
or reading the next agent’s DM: you’ve already built a platform
of people who want to read your story
though I don’t have the story of what sex work is really like
and I never did,
never even met the girl
Michelle told us of at the parlor
the girl who said, at the interview,
this is my driver–he needs to join us
if that’s okay
was never heard from again
don’t have the story
of what would have happened
if I met the manager when he texted
meet me in the parking lot of the McDonald’s
on 4th and 9th
don’t have the story
of the how I bought my penthouse
at age 22!
do not have the story
of you never would have expected this from a girl
like me–
in my story, life is the daily work
and I have refused it like I’ve refused all else
my life
of blowing half my cash on mangos & blue cheese & grape leaves
at the Whole Foods around the corner
my life
of silently snickering to every inch of my reflection in the full length mirror
while a stockbroker lets himself believe
I’ve only ever skipped condoms when with him
my life
of paying student loans
partially
before the seizure from the IRS
my life
of how I only pretended
to go down on Ashlen from behind
while she sucked some bastard’s cock
believing to this day
that to touch her in desire, without pay would make me violent, a raping thief
as pretending I knew her story, too, would make me that thief
even as I catch the glimpses: the West Village doorman, the degree from NYU then poof!
where there is no need to fight with those once beside you
when you’re sheltered under excess
where there is no need to fight with those once beside you
when you have written the memoir and said in The Nation:
Memoir writing is a form of activism in itself,
if you think about it
where you were never really beside them at all
or they beside you
where after the climax, the demonet:
and then it was time for me to move on
though a part of you never really leaves
my story is that I couldn’t tell you when I started
as I couldn’t tell you that I truly stopped
21, 18, 23, 15,
when Aris told me that many voices speak to many lives
when I was talking to myself—I, the lunatic again—
about how I couldn’t find my literary voice
a comma splice on a blank page
where the longest I’d ever been a person was seven years.
I could only ever write my story in different voices different genres:
Allison Eliana Cecilia whatever others I don’t recall
I used to shed selves like bones—
no lament of how nothing more could grow
only relief
from the reckless pleading:
We’re your sisters, we’re your mothers, we’re your daughters!
My story is the slippage from those relations
into a life where no one calls me theirs
into a story
that was never once a story
but a finger pointed back at you,
a canon laundering a bruise.
