Breasts are sentient beings with their own lives.
They aren’t inert, rounded lumps of flesh.
They make their own judgments.
The lymph nodes, milk ducts, fat, skin,
fascia, muscle– are living their own needs.
The nipples have their reactions to everything.
We can guess what’s going on,
but they’re devoted to their own Gods
and live for their own nets of values.
We can massage them, pray for them,
and ask them to be well every day,
but sometimes breasts go wrong.
Mostly we can’t control that.
Some people choose to remove them,
which makes sense.
Some breasts are mistakes, liabilities,
jiggling monsters, wrong in every way,
and everyone misunderstands what the
breasts want and how they should be treated.
To eliminate breasts frees our destinies.
Breasts are not required.
For some people, they’re parasites or growths.
I choose to keep mine; I store my love there.
When we hug, I press them onto you
as if their shapes were a stamp.
I leave an impression on your chest.
We act like that’s normal;
that’s how we evolved.
This is the burden I’m carrying.
I lie in bed at night to rest, and my breasts
dream their own slow paced stories,
like movies for babies.
Half paying attention, I might hear
a dramatic sound from the adjacent theater.
The dreams feature caves, death,
vast expanses of valley, and shimmering light.
Their dreams are like my gender.
Breasts vary, but most are thinking about
how much longer they need to live.
They’re summoning their energy.
Breasts are searching for justice
like desert pilgrimage walkers, like all of us.
They have so much projected onto them
that they need to say goodnight.

You have to be ready to kill him,
pulling him out
like a tick sucking your blood needs to be pulled out.
His head might come off in your skin.
By the time you’re ready to separate your lives,

he will have convinced you
that you’re killing him.
So the fifth time or the 18th time,
lie in bed at night
imagining him dead in the gutter.
The puddle of blood, spit, and vomit is real.
Or he found another gullible lover
like he’s so good at, convincing kind women
he needs help– he actually does need help.
Addiction means somebody is going to die,
and it’s not going to be you or your children.
The pain of killing the person you love
gets possible in the competition among
all the pains you have going now.
Something shifts– your own addiction
gets thinner and thinner, starved by reality.
He only loved the drug this whole time.
It gets impossible, the lie-cheat-steal-jail sequence.
I don’t have children, but I have meaningful projects.
I hate you enough (at this point)
to accept someone else will find the body.
God put me here to do something other than
die for an addict, so here we go.

I asked questions, trying to find
where they were an expert.
They showed me where they had cut their thumb
and wanted me to wince, then coo.
Genuinely I was sorry
like I would be sorry for a woman
or other gender of person
who was my actual equal.
Back when I talked to men, I would center them.
The conversation was about
not challenging them.
Then they wanted access to my body.
They saw beauty they wouldn’t
allow themselves to perform.
They projected their own secret beauty
onto me, then tried to devour it.
My curiosity about their pain
gave them a boner.
My giggle at their creative joke sealed the deal.
They wanted to touch my breasts especially.
My cunt they feared
as a wet portal to the other world,
but my breasts were a playground.
They were always lonely;
they needed to be held.
I thought it was my responsibility.
Their ideas were mostly repetition of culture’s standard
defeatist power bullshit.
They believed in hierarchy
and worked hard to be successful within
frameworks I had rejected as a child.
I looked at them as captive animals in a broken system.
I was always free,
but I chained myself to them in sympathy.
I was smarter than all of them
by the time I was seven years old.
But I thought I needed to be owned.
It was always me who welded the chain.
Then I realized I could get divorced.
I always preferred women,
but women taught me I exist to sacrifice myself.
Back when I talked to men, it was out of loyalty to women.