Cassandra Myers

Pleasure Cruising

there was a marriage where even the wet outline
of orgasm would bring me pain, in theory

on the boat, we have private cabins, and yet
I am a coward. To touch myself would be to admit

I couldn’t touch myself before, and still, cannot
While swimming naked, a jellyfish humbled me

to the hot white nerve. I was a precautious child, my mother reminds me
when I come home from my trip to my childhood bed where once

a duvet folded between my legs, a door without a lock.
thrill without fear is a mythos, Atlantis even in my dreams

anxious is what the gynecologist tells me, forcing the speculum
Like a dorado, thrushing the surface for dear life. What death

follows so closely behind, it tenses the body into an impossible climate
Try to relax, the pelvic physio therapist tells me, the chiro tells me, the
massage therapist tells me, the captain tells me—correcting my posture

bodygrotto, bodycenote, bodyeels, body, and its urchin hives

salt-lubed on my private shoal, without hands to rush me ~ she arrives

and never stops arriving. Gentler than my own hands, rushing the timer

I lose ending in the wave pattern as the world deadliest sea snails crawl
over my hands unknowingly. And when the water and I make our pact

I contribute to our volume.

cassandra myers

(My’z) (they/she/he) is an award-winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, and counsellor from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra’s work has won national literary and spoken-word titles including the National Magazine Gold Award in Poetry and Champion of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Find them @cass. myers.poetry or at cassmyers.com.