After reading “The Hairy Girls” in The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch

Sometimes, by sometimes 

I mean very often, I wish 

I was 16 again. My body, not 

the rest of me.  I wish I was 

a 16-year-old boy 

servicing 16-year-old girl me.

I’d fuck myself the way I always 

wanted. Girl me wouldn’t be afraid 

not only of being called a slut

but of the other who is not other.                  

She could just

enjoy her body,  

Boy me wouldn’t be afraid of 

being rejected or having to work 

for more. He’d just know 

how much girl me was addicted 

to every inch of him. A cock 

so hard and eager, you could build 

a city on it. Skin so tight and brimming with cum,

it might split like an overripe eggplant. 

I’d watch the fruit flesh of my dick

slide in and out of my own swollen flesh,

gripping spasms and releases of unnamed things. 

Soft, never-shaved hair sticking and sliding, 

leaving a map of swirling approval, 

jolts of pleasure spasm through

my limbs, ever growing webs

like cracks on the surface of thin ice

my sexuality is skating on. 

I’d eat myself out and it would drown me, 

tasting the sweet not-nectar, collapsing 

from pungent exhaustion. 

I’d finally know what it’s like to cum like a man. 

To e-Jack-u-late, the tingle of thousands 

of us exploding into and onto each other.

I dissolve like a sugar cube in the mouth 

of a horse. That’s where I got my rhythm from. 

up and down, up and down, training for more

than the next jump. Turn all of my-selves on.        

And while I was am at it, 

another 16-year-old girl me 

and I would eat each other out. 

I’d slurp the soul straight out of her oyster 

and drop it back into the gaping 

mouth of a still-orgasming girl. The kind 

of an orgasm only a girl can give another 

girl. Sometimes boy me would watch 

and, other times, girl me. And sometimes 

the two girls would be alone and sometimes 

the boy and girl would be and sometimes 

we would all be twisted together like a fleshy 

puzzle and sometimes we would all be alone, 

rubbing ourselves raw from the thought 

of each other.

Madeline Zilelian is a native New Yorker whose writing is deeply influenced by her Armenian Heritage and by the death of her parents. She earned her MFA in Fiction and Poetry from Antioch University of Los Angeles and was a genre editor for their student run Literary Magazine, Lunch Ticket. She is a former pro-snow boarder and blue ribbon equestrian. She currently is a poetry editor for Meow Meow Pow Pow. Her day job as a Real Estate Investor and Futures Trader gives her the financial freedom and flexibility to travel and write. She lives in Staten Island with her fiancé Steven.