disorder reigns

5

At the occult party, I’m dressed in green velvet, a plunging neckline, a cedar waxwing skull on a chain around my neck, a brass wolf cuff. The world tells me it’s a compliment when I get pegged as straight, and in this outfit I will, for better or worse. I don't feel beautiful so much as armored: like a basilisk, like the girl from the black lagoon dragging in radioactive tar on the undersides of her spiked shoes. In the kitchen, tattooed women are cooking naked or holding out oyster shots while they stand like Catholic statues, white veils thrown over their heads. If I pulled up the lace, I could lick their faces off like cupcake icing. I feel unfounded contempt and try to un-feel it by pouring table wine down my throat like a gorging mosquito. Outside, the party is better. A woman takes a bath in fake blood, and I'm distracted by her legs. Desire is simpler than discomfort: a beer in hand, my fiancée’s hot tights. I’m in line for the bathroom, and the women from the tub, wrapped in a towel, asks if she can go into the bathroom with me to wash herself off. In my new poems, a cadre of ghosts are always wrapping me in a shroud, piling on top of me so I'll stay hidden. But this woman is self-possessed, stripped down to her underwear and covered in Red #40. I wipe off her streaked back with the edge of the towel and she talks about squeamish men while I try to avoid looking in the mirror straight-on. What would it take for me to feel comfortable with my body again? Weight loss? A closet full of tailored button-downs? Some kind of butch baptizing ceremony? It's a question I usually avoid, but New Orleans is a city of performance. I feel compelled toward self-improvement, toward finding the right presentation (even if I’m really somewhere in between girl and boi, butch and femme), the one that feels less like armor and more like a fleece. But this velvet, at least, is fable-dark. The wolves on my wrist are snarling, and I find my fiancée on the dance floor. Everyone, I realize, looks silly under strobe lights—so I might as well join in.

Jennifer Hanks is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press) and The Unsteady Planet (Instar Books), a collaboration with illustrator Julie Herndon, both forthcoming in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as PANK, Arcadia, Autostraddle, Ghost Ocean Magazine, and Menacing Hedge. She was awarded a 2015 summer residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN. Follow her at @corsetofscales and http://azura09.tumblr.com/ ​

For more work by Jennifer Hanks, visit her page on our Online Sundries site.