If, in my one body, I’d a cock & pussy both,
I wouldn’t use them arbitrarily, toggling
back and forth on whims. Instead I’d make
a calendar: my cock today,
le lendemain my pussy.

Not unlike,
you’ll say, how you flop from your cock
to your bumhole as the prime site
where your desire inheres—and now
you need a pussy too? Be satisfied
with what your butt can do.
Dysphoria, you’ll say, okay,
but that’s subjective, an access
of fluidness, confusion
that you feel sometimes; c’mon, admit
that craving to appropriate
a pussy (given all you have,
all your enormous privilege) is, frankly,
entitled—acquisitive.

I say: do you believe these things
are zero-sum? That when I claim dissatisfaction
with my cock alone, and voice a wish
to have a cunt also—do you think
this requires that someone lose their own?
As if the global store of cunts
were finite?
 
Ugh,
You’re just a man you’re playing games you’re co-opting you’re not a real—
 
I’ve seen you in the patriarchy
saw you at that club one night
The Patriarchy
nice tunes there
Did you see him
I saw him he was there
And now he wants to be a she? a they?
Ha ha ha
Ha ha
HA!
HA
HA!
Guys maybe we don’t need to laugh
HA HA—!

Folks folks folks folks folks folks.
I don’t make claims of membership.
I have no narrative to offer
where from childhood I conceived
I was a girl. To measure by the company
in which I felt at home, more likely I
believed I was a book. I know I felt
weak and enjoyed that, fetishized
my softness, vulnerability
before I knew them to be
coded female. But that’s still
not quite the thing.

The thing, my claim,
the whole of it, is just: I’d love to have
a cock & pussy. Interchangeable
to suit the day. And also would like gender
to be overthrown, and every woman
now alive & also every boi
to adore me, and these goals not to be
contradictory.

I don’t ask much.
I blink, demure.
Solicitously, I extend
my round bottom to you.

Daniel Karasik (they/them) is a writer and organizer in Toronto. “Plenitude” was a finalist in this year’s Writing in the Margins contest at Briarpatch Magazine, where their journalism on prison abolition and trans liberation also recently appeared. Another new poem is featured in, confusingly, Plenitude Magazine. They struggle for labour justice with the Fight For $15 and Fairness movement and volunteer with a restorative justice-based healing/rehabilitation program for former prisoners, among other community work things. They are also the author of some books, including a poetry collection, Hungry (Cormorant Books), and most recently the fiction collection Faithful and Other Stories (Guernica Editions).

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