Me and Other Bodily Accessories

by Dom Witten

I’d be a better lover but the bitch
I have become is more interested in
penguin documentaries. Fact: penguins
have done more for humanity than
the NBA and that’s on my momma.

I am my mothers’ loneliness;
stubborn enough to want
despite what wanting
got me. This week,
I clamored my bones
into the lap of a statue
and looked and dreamed:
every man I’ve kissed
I’ve fucked. Some men
can only bring dick and dust
on a busted air mattress.

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

Sometimes, I fake interview
important people, ask where
they’ve been keeping Jimmy Hoffa
and my father. Everybody has a theory
on making love. I’ve loved a man
enough to know I’d rather not.

I still want ritual
and elegance, someone
to know how I arrange
spices and anthologies,
to squish my squishy
and call me beautiful.
I want to gyrate
this sloppy joe paradise
across every ballroom
between here and
Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

What if I want it all?

Dom Witten (IG: domthepoet22) is a Black poet raised on the end of a one-way street in Detroit, MI and the Co-founder of the Poetics Lab. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Dom’s poems are obsessed with establishing a future with more joy, sass, naps and emotional accuracy. Her poems are published or forthcoming in hex literary, Radar Poetry, Verse Daily, Black Minds Magazine, Greensboro Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Lindenwood Review and others. She is the winner of the 2022 Amon Liner Poetry Award and 2022 Academy of American Poets Prize at UNCG.