from my pleasure I

IRENE SILT

 
 
 
 

Audio: Irene Silt reads.

 
 

I have all this wetness that you don’t have
and you come back at me with
you’ve got a way with words, use them
I plead, like, there are no words right now! 
That would be my true pleasure, wordlessness

I speak for a lot longer in languages 
you do not understand
I have desexualized everything but the room
You fooled yourself into thinking 

I would unfold if you shook me hard enough 

One time you really got me talking you said,
I should give you amphetamine salts more often
Looking at you, I picked up another armful of mulch 
and it began to move. As I stood up, the mulch fell away 
and in my arms was a large black snake, cold
It unraveled and poured out of my arms as we gasped

What like, I am not aware of how I am fucking oozing?? 
That overcompensating solidity that is still so slick
Try to wash myself off myself I am becoming lost to air 

Blame it on the revolving door of my bed
or how the neglect made me masochistic
in a solitary way: a workaholic. There’s an idea
of feminism as living with consequence,
lacerated bodies communicating their lacerated lives

Your cunt is literally hard to get to
It clamps down so fucking hard 
and the one thing I did say is
I don’t care for biting

 
 
 
 

from my pleasure II

IRENE SILT

 
 

Audio: Irene Silt reads.

 
 

When I was fisting you I rested my arm on top of the A/C window unit 
and that time you were kneeling over me my legs fell asleep,
I gave them permission to float away

I pointed out that you always wear your underwear backwards, 
the face you gave me was dirty
Often I am extremely rigid yet balled up,
I used to call myself a 2x4 but now I am like 
crumbled up steel. Often you say, I can’t tell 
if you want this. I cannot always tell myself
Often, pleasure is somewhere outside the known and unknown
It is unknowingness, without any expectation 
that one day it will become fact. It is the honesty
of me not knowing if I want your mouth on me at all
and the lack of expectation that I will orchestrate your desire 
That I will open up onto you, when there is no denying
this will be for our use

 

My Decisions in the Bathing Water

IRENE SILT

 
 

Audio: Irene Silt reads.

 
 

Stillness is easy to appropriate 
I can claim silence with a flag 
Money showers pool
Into a stagnant puddle
I lap it up, taste your voice

Keep in mind I want you
I like to sit in front of it
Hold on and pretend it is mine 
Protected by the doing
Feel it fill into my mouthful

No I don’t think you are prude 
Here, a locker room of encounter 
A glide by, flash of your gap 
Could it be the middle of you 
That I am so lucky to know?

I heard you in my tonal yeah
The corner and the bottom
Open the centerfold as a hand 
Not over watered or under sunned 
The plant is rigid and taut

 
 
 

IRENE SILT writes about power, anti-work feeling, joy, and deviance. Her essays and poems have been published in Mask Magazine, ANTIGRAVITY, Spoil, and in the Tripwire pamphlet series. She lives in New York.

Originally published March 2021 in poiesis 2.1 by w the trees.