I’m afraid of everything, but mostly I’m afraid of starting. When I’m in Brooklyn, and I’m stimulated, I’m embarrassed to write of the pride in my emotions — how the big stinky city is full of the dirty freaks and their friends making love between the wars, I guess in post-Vice cultural years it becomes less and less cool to become excited by a city. Our cities are becoming more like nebulous clusters of identity-types, made possible by pixelated capital streams and girls becoming more beautiful by the humid night. Hot girls, so hot, make fun of a young lady who tweets that men move to Brooklyn to marry ‘Instagram girls’ and leave behind ‘beautiful mids’ in flyover states. I turn my profile to the side in the mirror, hold the bump of my non-pregnant belly. Instagram girl, maybe?  To you, I hope none of it is superfluous. Girls manage to maintain attention when they’re Aria from Pretty Little Liars, the emotional nerve center of the family and emotionally mature enough for a grownie at 16. Can I be like her at 27 in some way? My organizer friend lets me smoke with freedom and gall as he whips his hands around, never breaking eye contact, explaining to me why we’ll need organizational structures for power (Communism) and not mangey rangey freedom like what I believe (anarchism). I love him — I expected to sleep with him, but now he’s in love and we’re making art together in trust. I am not to be ashamed of the rise you cause in me, I think, eyeing his little braids and eagerness to think. The seditious expressions I let slip past my tongue, the way I imagine my waist smaller for you to hold it. But I do that for every boy! No pleading. The city slips away from me and I run home with my plots. I’ll get skinnier.

Doesn’t the anarchic female always have to present as the seductress, even in the midst of the civil war? At least, in the virtual, no of us us have any reason to be removed from the brief stimuli that currently constitute the breadth of our desire. On all of the timelines I exist beneath, algorithmically or of my own creation, women’s inexhaustible performance of the muse doesn’t seem to halt. No length to the emotion. Bleakly, I confess that the labor of the maiden waiting to be chosen for altar is most exhaustive to me, not even the slaving in the kitchen and looking like a dyke, but the punishment for looking like a dyke and not a princess in moments of tremendous effort and I expect it’ll probably be the same even after the revolution. No? Across the table, mid-meal, my intimates regard me with an appraisal that simmers down to bitterness. I suck my teeth, mmmft! I’ll show them, I’ll get skinnier, I’ll really speak my mind then.

When I read science fiction, I become sexier through escaping into the body of a fantasy, and this remote expulsion doesn’t fuel me passionately to either write or create new worlds. Dorothy Allison writes, “I was conditioned to suspend my disbelief with science fiction, and that meant I could imagine myself in the books. But it was still a big jump from my tentative and careful fantasies to imagining the sexual adventures of those marvelous heroines. That I began to do it all I credit to the power of the really gifted science fiction writers who gave me worlds in which little girls did not have to confront the horrors of my everyday life.” When I was littler I would bristle after a fantasy and shove my face into my pillow, infuriated by the delusion. When does the world dissolve and the sweetness become real? You’ll stuff yourself up with addictions, trying to cover that road over and over again. Making the pith taste sweet when it’s meant to be tough and ropy.