when the job you worked your ass off for is given
to an older white man with a soul patch, you ask
your husband to fuck you with the lights on—
and he obliges, because he loves you and also loves fucking you
// he’s good at it, but even still, you have to try not to think about
campus visits and job talks // about the novel you haven’t worked
on in months // about the ten pounds you’ve gained (at least)
since taking this job in the first place, since moving to a valley
in Colorado, between mountain ranges you don’t love the way
everyone else does, mountains that only ever looked like piles
of cash, too rich for your blood, thicker at 7,000 feet // about the
young men in your lit class who say Harjo is whiny and Bechdel
is boring and that Octavia Butler really was writing about slavery
when she says she wasn’t writing about slavery, who tell you they
wouldn’t have taken your class if they’d known how depressing it
would be, learning what it means to live as a woman in their world
// but they’ll like the new guy, or else won’t give him much trouble,
because he looks like what a professor should look like—lanky,
glasses, balding, shirt & tie // and you guess he’s probably never had
a student flirt with him in a free-write or try to talk to him about
girl problems during office hours // probably not // and you know
you won’t come with your husband fucking you like this, and he
knows it too, but he also knows you’re hurt and angry and that this
is the first time you’re not crying in days, so you know he won’t
stop fucking you until you tell him to, until you grab the vibrator
on your nightstand and close your eyes.
Brenna Womer is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019)
and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018),
and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency,
Indiana Review, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She
is also a contributing editor for Story Magazine, and lives in Baton
Rouge, LA.