SWAN SONG FOR HETEROSEXUALITY
Elizabeth Nicell
at fifteen I was swallowed and regurgitated
as a freshly baked batch of words I didn’t
know were allowed to sit
together
thought that they lived as hostile neighbors
in separate homes of anatomy,
that women smoked cigarettes in the
shell of my skull and gossiped men-crushes
and men-holding, and men pressed lips to
the swell of my ventricles all alone,
squeezed love in the hollow of stingy fists
but
insatiable woman
women-loving woman
men-loving woman
people-loving woman
I stuffed them back in the oven, quarantined
the women and their cigarettes back in my
brain in case they were contagious, in case
their infection of my heart could be chronic
At seventeen, a blink shattered the stove
and burnt me up inside, melted me, exposed
my bones and veins and blood that made up
the borough of the men kissing women, the women
kissing wom-
Bury me at the feet of those I love and
those that will never know it because saying it
constructs that village out here on the pavement,
and I still have those oven shards in my neck and
Hold me beneath the earth with your
grave dirt fingernails, dig in
my women-holding arms please
don’t let me apologize, don’t take my
sorries from my men-kissing lips,
from my women-kissing lips,
sew up your pockets and
don’t dig me up unless I tell you I don’t
love women, scream just-men-loving
from the lipstick tube casket you’ve
stuffed me into, don’t let me out
as dust fills my mouth, I’ll tell you how
on my first date with a man, he spit his gum
on the floor of a movie theater and when
around his women-loving men he would build
me one of those interrogation windows, where
I could see him rolling those crude jokes in his
mouth, molding gay in a people-hating way,
those shoes are gay that class was gay you’re gay
that’s gay that’s gay – all he saw was a mirror
his own pearly teeth looked upon pearly laughs
at his pearly jokes, and I punched and bit and
ate at the glass, but this booth was made for
criminals, the kind that you ask hard questions
to and expect confessions with a pearly tooth smile
generations were born while I forgot that words fell out
of an oven, while I gossiped men-crushes and men-holding
with a friend my chest squeezed for when we sat a little too close
he told me I was funny in the way that women
aren’t, while he smoked weed and drank fireball at
sixteen, I stared at women in the lunch line and
talked to God about the Rules
He followed I love you with can we fuck now?
And I kicked at the oven corpse, said no I am
waiting, waiting I’m a good girl I kneel
in pews when the Father asks I confess
when the Father asks I clasp my hands and say
Our Father Hail Mary Full of Grace Our Father
Our Father Our Father Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Deliver us from evil Deliver me from evil
I’m waiting, see I’m waiting
He did not need to know that the waiting
was for someone softer.
Elizabeth Nicell is from Glassboro, New Jersey. She is in the Class of 2024 and is majoring in English.
Her poems were drafted in Fall 2021 Semester’s Creative Writing: Poetry.