Photo credit: Mignonette Dooley
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Bad Girls Album Cover
By the time I was seven, I knew I would like sex, knew
I would be good at it. I practiced lying on my back,
knees bent, hairless prepubescent folds angled up to the air.
I knew nothing of actual sex. The only penis I had ever seen
was by accident—opening the bathroom door on my father’s
friend. But this was the time of Donna Summer. Under a
streetlamp’s maraschino cherry glow, she posed—wet black
ringlets framed her light brown-sugared face, pouting lips
slick in shiny scarlet gloss, high heel perched on the lamp’s base
plunging the slit of her dress back to reveal a black lace stocking
a garter as garnish—so naughty, so beautiful. Why wouldn’t I
want to be like her—up front about being wanted?
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Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (The 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (2017 Ohioana Poetry Award). She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
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