Four-Letter Words
Sydney vance
10
i always loved unavailable men, always wondered why
i named them man & not boy, always worried
that noting the distinction was too self-conscious. i always loved
the way that they would never touch me
but would always find a way to touch me,
always dissected my lonely with a spork full of rotten meat
if at all, always loved their biology & anatomy, always loved
how they knew their way around a scalpel & scapula.
i always loved the fact that a girl is a river, or ten rivers,
circling back to the same mouth, always loved the fact
that she is thirty different houses with wonky foundations &
leaky pipes, always loved how whenever she is judged,
she is judged sixty-nine times over
& under. i always loved the fact that i hated numbers
because numbers never wanted me anyway, but neither
did the unavailable men i claim to have loved,
or the rivers i swam in thinking them mine, the thousands
of other things i can say that i love but don’t need me to survive.