Dick pics
by Sarah Tsiang
Two dicks, sitting in
my daughter’s inbox.
Like men without hats,
waiting for any door
to open.
*
Sighting a stranger’s penis
used to be rare. Remember raincoats?
Like a flash of lightning,
like a scratch and win ticket –
sometimes glittering knock-off watches,
sometimes a sole flapping penis
shivering in the electric air.
*
An overcooked hotdog?
An aborted fetus?
A close-up of a thumb?
Rolled baloney on a lonely deli plate?
*
We have whole monologues
for vaginas. But I can only imagine
a penis as silent,
which isn’t the same
as listening.
*
The lighting is never
good. Harsh, taken in haste,
no one ever drapes
a dick in folds of linen,
the head never looks
back, one pearl earring
shining in stilled patience.
*
On every tunnel,
school yard, crumbling brick wall,
a graffitied cock, standing on balls
pointing to the night sky,
like a fallen constellation.
*
Women were for portraits, nudes
lounging, stuffed into frames,
luminous and arch. They were heads
and breasts, and feet, and buttocks
(though never speech). You must pay
and cross a velvet rope to see them.
The penis stood alone, in filthy
bars, and bathrooms, in wooded
parks, in the shadowed alleys
whistling a moon-white tune.
*
Now every penis is everywhere.
Like posters for a one-act play,
plastered on every telephone pole,
bench, building, on every mailbox,
on your kitchen chair,
so that you have to push through piles of them,
great snowdrifts of penises,
just to reach across the room
and tuck a stray hair
back into your daughter’s braid.
Reproduced with kind permission from The Moth
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem 2020
About Sarah Tsiang
Sarah Tsiang (b. 1978, Montreal, Canada) writes poems which deal uncompromisingly with contemporary sexual mores. ‘Dick pics’ is characteristically subversive and witty, with an eye for the unexpected image: ‘a graffitied cock, standing on balls / pointing to the night sky, / like a fallen constellation’.
Tsiang was initially resistant to seeing herself as a poet: ‘It seemed like a weighted, pretentious word and I wondered if I could still be a poet during my fallow times when I wasn’t writing? Eventually I realised that the act of reading and writing poetry was enough – to be a poet is similar to other trades (though with less pay) in that much of it is putting your head down and getting to work.’
Read reviews of Sarah Tsiang collections: Sweet Devilry, in Literary Mama, and Status Update, in Arc Poetry Magazine.
