For the Lake Street El

And on the cold wet sloshed curb

by the steel shop, at the corner where I’ve just crashed

my father’s secondhand Volkswagen Tiguan into the thick steel girder

which supports many tons of train track and human bodies,

where I am wearing only cloth slip-ons, size 17 women’s

feet turning as blue as the police car lights flashing on the dark face

of the young woman whose life I have endangered,

as my husband shivers and the tow-truck men argue with each other

and the drivers pass by this accident and the next one a block farther down,

I wonder if I will still make it to the massage supply store

for the bamboo massage table I have ordered, the one

I would have used to touch so many strangers,

pull and compress their naked limbs

in silence, with music, with a careful sheet over them,

as they laid their faces in its cool dark cradle;

 

the hands too big for a woman's, too ready to touch

anyone, anywhere, for free, for love, for money, for no reason,

for a trans woman who longs to be a prostitute,

for a trans man who refuses to let her out of concern for her safety,

for the needles and blood and piss and the knife, and the saran wrap I use

to tie her down to the bamboo massage table, which the policeman

delivered me to in his police car, down the last few city blocks,

 

I tie her down before I boil a thin silver rod of precisely smooth surgical steel

in one of her pots on the stove in her apartment at around 11pm,

and use it to fuck her soft sweet urethra,

on the bamboo table where I tried to help soothe my mother’s arthritis pain,

my husband’s complex post-traumatic stress disorder,

my girlfriend’s diabetic aches;

 

and the jojoba oil that smells like nothing,

not on skin, or hemp shibari rope, or wood, or in the backseat

of my secondhand Ford Taurus, in winter,

where it has turned solid like wax,

watching me text and drive,

watching the steel and the flesh and the weather.