The Best Kind of Crabs

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

The Best Kind of Crabs

for the sex store, and

It’s the year I become she

who tells customers with almost less than an eye roll not to use

that lube. The year I wonder if I’ll ever recover from the joy of using the word for the part liberation of exactitude telling strangers whose sex education or parents or

religion failed them that no

you can’t stick that up your ass or anyone else’s unless you want to explain it to the ER nurse.

I want to explain myself

when nobody understands I love my job.

I also love poems

but I love my job more right now and then

I start to wonder whether the poems I am moved to make have grown stale because of the love I am longing always to make to you, again, after you read me a poem in bed. We bathe in sun. I joke about the couple whose days’ old Fetlife relationship filled to the brim with “babe”s and “oh”s

and “I’m going to change my flight”

and “I’m going to buy this prostate massager.”

I’m not joking—they swelled my heart with hope. We use the best brand of non-latex condoms. I have an excuse to practice calling it like it is: you have a body as heavy and full

and living as my own. You get the runs. You fuck up, feel embarrassed, feel too fat. Your stress climbs under covers between us to fight my PTSD for the spotlight. I buy you another pocket pussy because I’ll be away on and off through March. You remind me that not all gifts have to be for your penis so I bring you socks from the airport in Baltimore blue with red crabs. You say these are the best

kind of crabs to receive from a lover.

You cock one hip, naked with a towel curled around your hair. I am gone again this week. My tongue misses your penis and my chest misses your spine, your teeth miss my shoulder and I wish I was going to tell a stranger about the best—really, the best—clitoral vibrator today. I wish I was going to come home and tell you she didn’t buy it wish you’d ask to watch me

use my vibrator so you could interrupt and make me sleep from orgasms and love and blur and poetry.

My mouth knows the words for the parts

but my body only knows it wants to be with yours.

~ Carly Madison Taylor

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Carly Madison Taylor is a poet, songwriter, and essayist living in Buffalo, NY. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and Dance Studies from Knox College in 2016. More of her work can be found at Memoir Mixtapes, Blanket Sea Magazine, Vamp Cat Magazine, and in Rhythm & Bones Press's own You Are Not Your Rape anthology. She’s on Twitter @carma_t.