To the Man Who Asked Me if I’d “Taken a Trip to Thailand Yet?”
Shay Mahoney
okay, so you want to eat me, but only if the meat
doesn’t touch your tongue. you want a Happy Meal without
the toy, quick and cheap and easy that you can masticate
in the back of your car, a grab-and-go girl you can make fast
food of. you’re hungry for novelty, got a little bit of PornHub
caught between your teeth. well, i’ve got bad news for you,
boy. i’m a chicken-wire witch, a sculpture of sharp edges; i’ll cut you
to the bone. i’ve got caltrops for shoulders, pikes for elbows, daggers
for fingers. there is nothing sweet nor satiating about me. you might
be hungry, but brother, i am starving, have been for centuries. i’ll
shred your throat going down, turn to tuberculosis in your gut; i’m a
butcher
bacterium, baby, a bite-sized slice of spoilage slitting your stomach
from inside. you named me in the dead of night with a hand down your pants:
tranny, shemale, femboy, and licked the lust from your teeth like sugar; shame to
say i’m used to sloughing off dead distinctions, dredging divinity from dust. there is
no God here, only her angel, dealing cards in a casino at the edge of Heaven,
fwip-fwip-fwip of flat black spades splaying out between worn fingers, her halo
hollowed into a holster for the twenty-gauge shotgun slung over a broad back
between bleak wings. you think
yourself skilled at counting cards, playing perverse hands by the fistful; you’ve
forgotten who i am. i am Eden and the apple, a woman and a woman consuming
herself, and you
are the serpent i strangled in the sidereal seconds before sunset.
Shay Mahoney (she/her) is a student, writer, and poet hailing from Albany, New York as the daughter of two medical workers. Prior to attending Ithaca College, she attended several other programs, including the Bard Young Writer's Workshop, Seguinland Institute's Wintering Program, and Bennington College's writing program. She is the second recipient of the Louise Cannon Poetry Prize. The body of her work primarily focuses on the transfeminine experience, body, and voice, as well as the horrific, macabre, and sorrowful. When not busy writing, she can be found streaming games on Twitch, reading Gretchen Felker-Martin's novels, and spending far too much money on caramel-vanilla lattes.