JESSICA PIAZZA

TWO EXCERPTS FROM "My Life As a Hooker in Panama City"

BODY

O outside the church!
O below the buttresses that fly
like coins flipped uncertainly
in search of certainties
O how the walk from the stone
steps to the quarter pay
phone is as long as the line
of penitents waiting to eat,
as sad as the sameness of hungers and
O the smell of semen and sweat
the smell of the female sea
the smell of bills which is the smell
of a thousand fingers and oil-soaked wallets
Blessed are the legs that open
like ovens
the doors that have opened
like ovens
praise the heat inside
each and the simple task of raising
and lowering temperature!

O the sirens that flash in the dim!
Blessed are the sirens that do not
flash for me!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Remember Peter, who touched hot oil to my skin, turned me inside out, made me slippery, as women are. Remember him as the hangover meal, greasy and satisfying; cheap.

Remember Jonah and his dancer feet, the way they curved and twisted. Think of his waist creased red from the cinching. Remember his sigh when I lowered his royal blue tights, opaque and moist with sweat, and hung them from the lamp as a woman might when undressing hastily.

Remember the brash: the vixen Laura, how her lipstick marked everything with stains like spilled wine. The way she said her name in three syllables, the vowels rounded distinctively into the last R, the A like a grimace, the U like a puckered kiss, the opening and closing of her mouth the way a fish might gape. Recall the way she drank from the bottle fully, how some dripped from the glass lip and rolled a lazy line to touch her breast, to lose its diluted color against rouged nipples.

Josephine’s, La Palace, La Fenix: keep the gilded clubs in mind, the places it began, the men who took me home, stared at my young form backlit against the burlap curtains of the push-button motels and gave me $20 cab fare in the morning. Remember these like a homecoming dance, the old familiars gussied up with trickery, on their best behavior.

And Jack the Night Manager, who sent the Americans to me. And Jack the Night Manager, who wanted blowjobs behind curtains while the g-stringed Columbian girls watched from the stage. And Jack the Night Manager, who fell at my feet one early Sunday not-quite-morning, drunkenly begging me to unhand him, swimmingly ashamed.

And the rich ones who were white and reeked of expensive scent. The poor ones who haggled like gypsies in a market. My flesh like the spongy inside of an apple. My flesh still fresh like morning produce, not yet tainted by noontime sun. The poor ones who would filch my brown skin like a ration of soft bread if they could, the Jean Valjeans who would be jailed for this small nourishment, the poor ones who would imagine me fragrant and dream of breaking me open. The rich ones who would eat of me slowly, painstakingly, as if searching for seeds to spit.

The rich ones who took me to parties, those hidden islands in oceans of champagne and tequila and rum. The poor ones who chauffeured us there in sleek cars, bumping over suspended bridges, rear-viewing us with tired and hungry eyes.

Remember all of them, each a twig in the nest. Each important and perishable. Remember them, because you will not hear of them again.

JESSICA PIAZZA is Co-Director of the Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City. She studied Creative Writing and Journalism at Boston University, and has published poetry in The Formalist and journalistic pieces in several print and online magazines. Recently, Jessica has worked with former U.S Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky on the Favorite Poem Project and participated in establishing poetry and slam events in Brooklyn high schools.