My mother tells me I am smart like Frankenstein,
but these days, I resemble his homemade monster.
All shock, all scars, all spliced up;
stitched back together with my own hands.

Sometimes, I think she’s right about me.
I feel like I am made of different people’s parts,
like nothing inside me fits together anymore.

It makes me wonder about Frankenstein’s monster;
if he felt anything about all that patchwork.
If he dreamt of taking himself apart as well,
trying to rearrange his mismatched pieces.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books.
Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
— William Faulkner*

Faulkner said that maybe love
cannot live outside of libraries

If his assessment is accurate
then I want to pen our passion
on every piece of paper I possess

I will produce poetry proclaiming
the severity of our seductions

And scribble you and I between
asterisks on the pages of periodicals
so we can be among the stars as well

Darling, I will turn all of our dates
into diary entries and change the
definitions for words like brilliance and
glorious into descriptions of us

When I’m through, we will
have the most eternal
love stories around

after Sanam Sheriff.*

In this dream, the statistic isn’t 1 in 3 because there is no statistic. There is no **** whistle swaying from our necks. No Rohypnol swimming in our drinks. There is no need for colour-changing nail polish to tell us that the stranger we haven’t seen or the friend that we have is trying to take advantage of us in the alley behind the club. Or our cars in the grocery store parking lot. Or our bedrooms as our mothers think they have just gone to the bathroom. In this dream, we have no need to invent a word such as ****. No need to be afraid of who’s in the dark. No need to be afraid for our daughters. No need to panic every time a man raises his voice. Every time a man raises his hand. Every time a man raises his belt buckle. In this dream, there is no more catcall, no ***-grab, no staring so hard it feels like his eyes have already touched us in places we never consented to. In this dream, consent is part of the foreplay. In this dream, we do ask for it. In this dream, they don’t touch us otherwise.