I lost my virginity at 17
I made love to I gave myself away
The first time I fucked I was 17, on a hand-me-down mattress,
the same stained & lumpy container of cotton & rusted springs
that I was born on.
Poetic? Maybe.
Or maybe it was just an old mattress & two hungry teenagers.
I was taught to read into it though: love making
something sacred.
But what is sacred about fumbling?
About the stretch & tear? About the afterwards?
When I looked in the mirror, I wasn’t sure if I could see it,
the ruined thing, the youth pastors had threatened in church
basements, on Friday nights around slices of Little Caesars,
Hot-N-Ready (Congealed-N-Greasy) with their fake smiles
& false promises of excellent sex if we could only wait—
But the more sex I had, the better it was & I wondered why
I would deprive myself for marriage when my parents
had proved it would be nothing more than bitterness, broken
plates & bruised ribs. I stared long & hard, looking
for all I had become: chewed gum, stained sweater, broken doll,
the whore—
The first time my father called me a whore, I was 13
in the passenger seat of his Chevy & the only parting
my legs had done was ten years prior for the grandfather
he had left me with & again at 7 for someone else’s dad
in the Sunday school room, after church—
a violence I won’t remember until years later,
when a man that I think I love, will brush his fingers
against my sex & the memory will burst like a bubble
between my legs. My body will move against his
without me in it for days after & he will ask if I am still
in this with him & I will nod & shrug & pick a fight
—an attempt to forget I ever remembered.
When I was 11, my mother taught me that my body
was like a puzzle piece. That God made men
& women to fit together—
My mother warned me:
once you lose yourself, it gets easier to do it.
A strange lesson, but one I held onto.
For three years, of my young life I was:
the loyal girlfriend with an insatiable appetite,
even after I caught him again & again with other
women—I stayed, afraid of what leaving him,
of what fucking someone else meant for my soul.
Eventually, the leaving came easy,
as did the men after him:
There was the man who took: the ghost of his knee shoving my legs
apart, every time I lay flat on my back & at my pap each summer,
while they look for the abnormal cells he left on my cervix—
There was the man who expected: at 6pm, at 3am, the night before
my thesis defense when he called me, high on acid & kept me up
to protect him—from the curtains, from guilt, from his own mind.
There was a handful of lovers, that let me hate them like I hated myself
& somehow, they taught me more about love than the ones who claimed
to have loved me—
I was 21 when I realized that I liked girls. 22 when I sat at the kitchen table
& told my mom, who told me that I was the product of her religious crisis—
how heavy
to be the downfall of self,
the downfall of her,
the downfall of all the men I’d led astray—
how heavy.
If I were a man, I would be a celebration.
a high-five bro! locker-room-round-of-applause,
a champion.
If I were a man, my lovers would be conquests
I would be envied & encouraged & idolized.
But instead, I am a whore,
a tramp, a trollop, a tart.
I am easy, nasty, loose.
I fucked to feel something but each time I came
away from it the same as before. I wanted
hellfire, or burning bush, or condemnation
& every time it passed by me I got angrier.
I wanted a closeness to the God they all loved,
to the God they saw as something more
than one of deprivation.
When I was 22, I took a year of celibacy & after, I fell in lust
with the first man who made me finish. He had a felony
& a habit for making everything my fault.
When I was 24, I moved across the country alone
& in the silence of my one bedroom, I listened to my body
& all the ways that she wanted—I gave & I took, but mostly
I learned to ask & it was then that I heard my God, quietly
at first & then louder & louder still—a throat raw, final
outcry—an answer to all my questions. My God isn’t one
of deprivation, of all take & no give.
My God is the God of Love, of Selflessness,
of Choice of Pleasure, of sex
of Women, of Whores of this, I am sure:
A body, is a body, is a body & it wants.
A whore has a body & she wants, I want.
Had I stayed,
had I curled into duty, into responsibility,
into a single man—
I’d never have learned to love, haven’t yet
only how to ask, how to tell, how to grasp pleasure
how to insist on my right to it, insist on my worth
because of it.
I am fearfully & wonderfully a whore.
The Whore’s Manifesto
The whore believes in love & also in the separation of love from sex.
The whore believes in the complete separation of the body from the church.
Believes Jesus was also a whore—believes they would have eaten together.
The whore worships at the alters of kink & vanilla—shares in a communion of fetish & fluid.
Believes in fellowship with whores.
The whore believes in monogamy in multitudes in multiples in the multifunction
of the lover. The whore believes in genderless love genderless sex too!
Believes in one night /every night / never at night—
The whore believes in pre martial post martial open & experimental
Believes in one lover / every lover / never lover—
The whore believes in pleasure in want in being forward in telling in regret free.
Believes also in no & all it’s iterations.
The whore revels in the body in its function inside & outside of pleasure.
The whore can love modesty can be a nudist can be both can be neither!
The whore believes in respect in respectful disrespect
in praise & in degradation believes in asking Is this okay?
Does this feel good? Do you like this? What would you like?
They believe in aftercare in mutual care in communication & honesty.
The whore believes in safe sex in plan b in the woman’s right to choose
Believes life begins at first breath believes in men shutting the fuck up about it.
The whore believes in comprehensive equal access education of sex
Believes in asking questions in giving answers in openness.
The whore believes in free & affordable healthcare in normalizing & destigmatizing
1-in-5 people in the absence of shame.
The whore believes the right to whore in the right to not whore
in not needing to defend either choice. The whore believes in minding your own damn business.
