Selfward

In one life, I was a mail-order house
with a picture window for a mouth.

Every sigh hit with a thud, every word
was a spot of blood on the glass. 

If you looked closely, you could see inside:
my sex on a table like a porcelain bowl

refilled & refilled. I sold myself. The deed
was a wad of pink gum stuck beneath

that table for thirty years. You understand:
there was no doer & there was no door.

Call me a ward of the state of things—
a call girl, a girl to be called “girl.” We all were

bound for wealth. We all dressed ourselves
with names & lips like awnings.

Each man stood on his sex like a scaffold,
holding a brush & a bucket of blue.

Rochelle Hurt is the author of the poetry collections The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022); In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016); and The Rusted City (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in POETRY magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. She's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. Hurt lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

“Selfward” appears in her forthcoming book, The J Girls: A Reality Show, which won Indiana Review's Blue Light Books prize and will be out from Indiana University Press this spring.

“Selfward” was originally published in Bat City Review Issue 12.