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I ascended into womanhood tits first, which is how all girls ascend—nipples hooked, lifting us from the safety no one said would dissolve the day fat thickened our hips like soft ropes used for the strangling. During my 12th year on this planet and my first year with tits, my best friend’s dad walked into the kitchen in denim hot pants and stared at my chest. I thought, The 70s called. They want their shitty shorts back. I knew this wasn’t funny but snark—even very bad snark—is a newly-breasted girl’s best friend.
That night, he took me into his bedroom. Cells swirled in my head as I took hit after hit of the joint he’d handed me. I saw more than his legs but that’s not important. He is a side character. He is not my trauma, which I know because I love my traumas, and I do not love Hot Pants Dad.
Are you sad?
I water my traumas every night. They sprout like cigarettes breaking the surface of sludge water. If I don’t love my traumas, no one will! They’ll float down the river at the base of the abandoned factory, tumble over a waterfall and disappear into a sea of so many traumas, they’ll lose their difference like tampons pulping to rayon shreds in the toilet. I feed my traumas Cool Ranch Doritos. I play them Tori Amos’s “Precious Things.” I cradle their spongy heads against my breasts, where all of this began, tell them to suckle hard till milk froths their mouths.
You may think your traumas are like faceless potatoes rolling dumbly over each other in the dirt, but that act vanishes the second you turn your back. The potatoes shape themselves into arms and legs—faces congeal from Monet to DaVinci. Traumas are not the blurred hues taped to every freshman’s dorm room in America. They are the stern Renaissance realism of a Medici dynasty!
Are you sad?
My traumas know why I have humiliation fantasies till foamy sugars whiten my thighs. They know why I went to the douchebag investment banker’s BDSM party and spent the evening in the corner with two leather lesbians who punished me till my ass bloomed bluer than Aspergillus mold. They know why, during my drive to Binghamton University for a writing conference, my fingers went numb with terror and I couldn’t feel the steering wheel’s hard surface in my hands. I exited off of Route 80 into an unnamed town with one gas station with one porta potty that had not been cleaned since 1989.I used it, god help me, then ran to my car parked behind the station, stripped off my jeans, underwear, socks while thinking, This is how I die This is how I die This is how I die. I called my friend to say I wouldn’t make it to the conference. I’d wait for the porta potty’s poisons to seep through my pores and infect each organ. My body diseased My body unclean My body diseased My body unclean is the refrain on repeat in the back of my mind at all times. It screams to the surface on occasions like The Great Porta Potty Incident of 2023. I trace its origins to Sex Ed Day in fifth grade. Sister Dorothy ordered the boys out of the class. Once they’d vanished, the room went dark. Folds oozing pus, skin pocked with endless sores, filled the screen at the front of the room. Genitals of every shape and size bled before our horrified eyes. I don’t recall what Dorothy said in the aftermath of that slideshow, but the message was clear: Contagions lurk everywhere, waiting to worm their way inside your sin-sick body.
In our dream band, on Sappho’s lyre:
Claudia Cortese (she/they/femme/them)–a queer poet, essayist, and fiction writer–is a 2023 recipient of a NJ State Council for the Arts Grant. Her debut full-length, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press), won Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Award for Emerging Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press) and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press). Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and The Offing, among others, and her poems have won awards from Baltimore Review, Rhino Poetry, and Mississippi Review. She is a book reviews editor at Muzzle Magazine. In 2021, she published the first peer-reviewed article exploring the poetry book covers of fat-identifying poets. Cortese was awarded a 2018 OUTstanding faculty ally of the year certificate from the LGBTQ+ Center at Montclair State. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio and lives in New Jersey. She teaches at Montclair State University in the Department of Writing Studies and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 