Sex+: “shame/she/sea” by Ariana Matondo

shame/she/sea

so she tells me: kneel,
fresh water.
i can’t imagine 
being an else. an other.
okay, i try. i bend 
language. i scrape 
landscape. i paint 
Sunday over 
the scrawl of chalky lavender 
and forget the time i learned
what edible glitter tasted of
off her lip. i run a prayer 
though old
alluvial plains, i build 
Noah’s Ark. i meet desire
at her mouth—a place 
where river meets sea. 
i beg her to spare my kind;
to remove all our abyssal and 
abysmal. to take the a’s 
out of shame. the m’s too. 

what i never knew floods in.

what i remember out
pours.

the river salts—
we go again. 
tongued the wet sand
and the bed sang. like two wild
horses on the salt river,
                     together one shape 
     amongst the petrichor night—
     we built God together. 

foam the shape of breasts
and brine the shape of form.
religion has no fist here. scorched
skin couch surfing on curious
earth, swallowtails that dance
upon our secrets, her hands slipping
into my folds of want. tonight, i am 
pleasure, not conquest; able to untangle myself
from her many mouths, but god
knows i never tried.

About Ariana Matondo

Ariana Matondo (they/she) is a queer disabled Tanzanian American poet, researcher, and teacher based in Tampa, Florida. They are the recipient of the Bettye Newman Poetry Award (2022), Thomas Sanders Scholarship in Creative Writing (2022), Vermont Studio Center Fellowship (2024) and Light for Public Health Poetry Prize (2024). Ariana's work focuses on disability justice and intersectionality, mapping literary cartographies of their ancestry, and exploring ways of orienting the body towards queer and peculiar ways of living (the best kind of way to live, by the way).

Ariana is currently working on their MFA in poetry at the University of South Florida.