Susan E. Thomas

I. Sermon for Painting
II. Fucking with Biology
III. Three Summers
IV. About Susan


Sermon for Painting

Put the painting in its place!
Tack the cipher to the wall!
Planets throw down
Their spheres of oil

What you have to give up--

Chime whirrs twice.
Say the name out loud,
It'll recognize itself:
Small Purple Flowers in a Vase
Beside the Wall

You're getting it,
aren't you (in the dark)

Keep pressing the doorbell,
occupy a wonder
You're getting away with murder

Fucking With Biology

hundreds of years ago
passing crude operation
castrati, in action, singing

everyone seeking everything
modifying
into the twenty-first century

clitoris, however, intact
attention on fire
milk in the lips

let me pull your
coffee table books
right out of the Border’s bag!

can you handle the
tricky new positions
ink and piercings on the bed?

drugs we take at 30
different than before
we've done it, now

As a child we kept Ding Dongs in the freezer
the adult in us prefers heat puts energy
bars inside pockets

childhood gone makes blackness
put the metal in my torso
becoming bionic rules!

Three Summers

I put my body right in
the oily sunlight
gypped of oxygen
I eat slick pollution
the breaking down of cells
is also part of history
I forget that
I come to watch
beautiful swimming creatures

Female cruelty in summer
is cruelest of all

I press my face into the waves
and stay in the water
when hundreds of sting ray
swim in along the shore

Fingers on the steering wheel only
inside no one

on my way from the beach
I listen to country music
a genre so wrenching
there is no other inner life

With most of the facts
of my transgendered childhood
long gone
I return to my apartment
step out of my bikini
wishing I could offer myself
as sacrificial femme
once again.