Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry
192
Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry
192Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781551527819 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Amber Dawn is a white queer femme survivor living in unceded Coast Salish Territories, Vancouver. She is the author of four books (the most recent of which is the novel Sodom Road Exit) and the editor of two anthologies. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and guest mentors at drop-in, sex work–driven community spaces.
Read an Excerpt
AMBER DAWN
The World’s Oldest Love Spell (a Fairy Tale)
True Foxes Massage sat on the corner of 108 Avenue and Whalley Boulevard and shared a cracked-asphalt parking lot with Triple XXX Adult Video and Toys.
The shop madam bought us quality Jergens brand lotion and Ultra Soft Kleenex and baked her trademark double chocolate chocolate chip cookies every Sunday.
Between noon and nine p.m. sugar was the top fragrance note overpowering all spunk stink and this made Sunday afternoon the most coveted shift on the schedule.
We all figured Madam once turned dates herself because who gets DD implants for her own entertainment?
I greatly favoured True Foxes over the shop owned by the failed-restaurateur-cum-pimp in Kitsilano or the shop run by Hells Angels that burned down in a faulty electrical fire.
The only problem with True Foxes was the Surrey RCMP vehicle that often idled in our parking lot because what date has the nerve to pull up next to a cop car?
We played premises searches right. At the site of oncoming blues we slipped into spa robes that covered our bodies between the neck to the top of our knees and below the elbows.
The Body Rub and Lingerie Model Studio license hung by the front door in a gold-gilded frame which we routinely tipped from the nail for inspection.
None of our rub rooms were smaller than a cargo van and all were brighter than fifty candle flames. You boys think I don’t know how to run my business?
Madam — bless her golden-aged hooker mouth — never should’ve back-talked and sure enough the Surrey RCMP doubled on us like Doomsday.
Shop will blank if they keep jamming our lot. Fucking cops, they’re eating
A&W out there. I got kids to feed. Donna was the one to call the ersatz
stakeout a curse. She pinched a ten-spot from her bra. Under the welcome mat went Sir John A and within the hour we heard the date-doorbell chime.
Whore lore! Why hadn’t we thought of it sooner? Sup-whore-stitious!
We’d forgotten power but Madam lit the dollar store candles to call a circle.
What charm will we bring? What rue and iron? What divinity and dark?
We salt rimmed the rub rooms and hid rosemary bows under daybeds.
Turn-outs chanted, money money come to me, in abundance, three times three.
Golden-agers answered, harming none on its way, I summon money, come to me.
Coco rewrote our newspaper add so each print line added up to numerology nine.
Cleo broke the eyes of six sewing needles. Lily tracked moon cycles. Elle set fires.
We adopted a black cat and named her Willow and for a good long spell the only blue we saw was the midnight sky as we waved our dates goodbye.
But wind changed again when Donna came late for her shift. Officer took me for a courtesy ride. Bruises rising below each shoulder like she’d been shook.
The following Sunday sparrow flew through the shop window and a plain-clothed cop posing as client followed. He cuffed Cleo before she could even towel him off.
A ready-rolled raid had us stripped to our g-strings for a game of who-will-cry-first.
Our purses gutted. Phones wiped. The four corners swept by brute force.
Our stars are un-fixed. Our spring water made ill. We regrouped in the Triple XXX
amid the dildos. Madam clanged in anger and avowed, Ain’t no hex like a hooker hex.
Donna gathered graveyard dirt. Coco knotted black yarn. Cleo summoned Baal.
I came flesh-wound close then rethought cutting alms across my palm. Blood
scarification was not made for we who mete out hand jobs as a vocation.
Madam turned to her mixing bowl—butter and chocolate chips and spit.
Baneful magic is made worse when cast together. So we gathered round the raw dough. Bitter saliva and tricks on our tongues. May their might
overturn. May they be dealt the same hand. May their rule turn to ruin.
May teeth rot from their jaws. May their seeds turn crooked and cruel.
Wait! Lily broke our incantation. I cursed my father and he went mad. Or madder than before. He’s moved on to my baby sister now.
Lily’s right, said Cleo I cursed my first boyfriend and he went missing. He’s missing still. I wonder about the jerk sometimes.
Coco groaned and swigged back the ritual wine. Pussy up, witches!
Cops ought to be taught a lesson. This curse is our duty, our holy charge.
But curses don’t teach, curses harm, said Madam. And harm is hard to contain, even for sorcery sluts like us. Think wide and wisely.
We put it to a vote before long our unanimous hands rose. The hex was nayed. We still have charm. We can still pussy up, said Madam.
Her right hand pushed into her panties and we awed. Never before had we seen
Madam uncross her golden-aged legs. We heard polyester lace rip and slush and then we remembered the oldest of circles. We moaned and wet-messed
in this primordial magic. The spell set as we buried our hands in raw dough.
We knead passage. We knead respect. We knead love. We knead love.
As below, so above, we knead your love. The balm of our fresh-baked blessed-
strokes and sugar blew through True Foxes’ window and across the parking lot.
Three cop cars rolled in as Madam arranged the warm cookies on a silver tray.
We joined hands as she stiletto-marched out to meet them.
Braced and silent, but chanting love behind our teeth.
GREGORY SCHOFIELD
the dancer (club mix)
see him he is un touchable, unreadable,
more lovely than smooth gravity glistening
down the length of his body his small hips, his tight
perfect ass swinging up to the platform, all motion
swivelling on his golden ball-bearings.
see him moving
on rhythmic cue, he is beautiful, so unreadable
the curve of his spine is the jigsaw puzzle
we want to put together,
the damp lush scene he is
getting paid to unlock his vaulted package,
the overflowing box of our stone-dragging youth.
but we are falling at his feed, longing
to take each biblical toe into our mouths, praying
to be his stigmata, oh his incubus-tongued angel,
love eye-d, all sugar-eyed like the e-queens bopping high,
messed on their own love trip tripping though we’re all chasing
locks, zippers,
the elastic band
holding his jockstrap together.
but he is
getting paid a doctor’s wage to be that fat man’s murderer,
the old troll’s executioner, a killer made more lovely
stroking the blade of his oh so deadly nipples.
and beneath the red light he will be the boy in school
who beat the shit out of us for looking: he will be
our velvet fuck, our burly-man prince,
our mint-
flavoured lamb, our saviour ... but see he is grazing down his belly,
all ten fingers an arsenal to keep us smouldering.
we can smell the gun powder between his legs
and we want to pop, pop pop
because he is getting paid to fuck our minds, getting paid
to make us forget our mirrors,
the crystal-dropping twinks
floating to the dance floor,
bouncing like muppets.
because he is getting paid
to make the drag queens feel like real women, getting paid
to be their spank-spank boy,
the roughneck quarterback
running them past the goal line of snickering small towns,
fathers who just wouldn’t understand,
but see he is
all muscle, his perfect ass swinging.
he is our golden trumpet,
our rainbow flat anthem:
Everybody wants to be somebody
Everybody wants to be somebody
Everybody wants to be somebody
Everybody wants to be somebody
and he is getting paid by the man upstairs who
discovered his ass,
knew it
would be a money-maker, a ching-
ching factory of coke-den lies,
a bar tab of heart heart
heartbreak - but see he is un touchable, unreadable,
more lovely than smooth gravity glistening, sliding
down the length of his bones.
but he is getting paid at the end of the night and
these are some of the bones he takes home; his
mother's narrow foot dancing away from him, his
grandmother’s hairpins falling into a drawer
deep in his memory, the blood bursting inside his aunty’s head
while she was sleeping,
drunk ... and his own
aching bones,
half-breed and kicking.
yet later, swallowed by the empty mouths of our beds,
we will think of him.
we will make him pay.
he will be our second-hand doll and we will use him
for free, as if he meant nothing
LESTER MAYERS
CYNICISM
“Because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.” -Maya Angelou
The rescue of the morning sun gazed upon his bruised,
bloody black body kicking awake his reality.
The sounds of the semi-busy Brooklyn street tore through the 2014 Aeropostale hoodie that covered his ears.
The screeching buses which could’ve easily been confused with screams of terror at midnight… stopped to let off faces of plum, yellow, honey human beings whose voices mixed perfectly with beeping horns and loud cellphone talkers whose conversations probably were heard a block away.
Children’s morning grunts and elder’s “Good morning” prayer was thrusted upon strangers they passed on the street.
It was another day for him.
Another survived attack of selling his body to dick gone wrong.
Just hours earlier he trolled the back ends of Harlem looking for a John who choked and punched him dead in the eye after he requested his pay from a job well done.
After the brutal attack at the hands of a ‘married straight man’
he hopped on the downtown C train on 116 street leaking blood at 2:30 in the morning. The hunger pains in his stomach and the fearful tremor that controlled his breath began to dissipate as he began making his way towards Brooklyn. A place where he knew no one would inquire about his face/well-being and plights. He would be invisible.
To him invisibility meant safety.
Yawning and stretching through last night’s disappointments and confusions of morning cultural-madness, he found the strength and quick intelligence that the street taught him to grab his backpack that had been tucked between his legs and rush to the nearest Clean Rite Laundromat.
When he arrived, the owners were in the back cleaning out dryers and whipping down washing machines from the night before.
He snuck into the restroom and began to make his morning ablutions.
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a three-toned stained towel that had gone from white to brown and roughly rubbed the hard-dried blood that covered his face like snot on a 2-year-old child on a winter’s day.
He pulled out a wrinkled pair of brown pants and a purple collared shirt with a school logo on it to costume his ashy body.
He sneakily exited the laundromat and treaded towards school to make it in time for breakfast.
“Good morning Ms. Johnson.”
Ms. Johnson grunted at him, hinting at the usual disappointment of his wrinkled uniform and disheveled, untended to skin and hair.
“Good morning Ujasiri, tuck in that shirt and put some lotion on.”
Ujasiri laughed to himself.
Ms. Johnson was the closest thing to a mother he had.
She was a blunt, lightly toasted buttered black woman with short hair and glasses.
She could hear a fly landing against a wall in a room full of loud of teenagers.
She spoke with the diction of God and had the arms of a noble black woman who could “Throw zown in the kitchen”.
The students hated her ass; she was the law.
She treated everyone with the same respect and held everyone to the same standards no matter how they presented themselves.
She was the dean of students but in true black woman fashion she quadrupled as a: cook, therapist, pastor and sometimes doctor.
Parents knew when she called home, she meant business.
The clock flew like tears on the face of a motherless child that just received news of their morning turned mourning.
School was out and the biggest task of staying lowkey was achieved.
The afternoon warmth settled on the concrete ground creating a fragrance of spring.
A fragrance that greeted the energized children that now flooded the temporarily abandoned streets.
Children ran home, or to after-school programs,
while Ujasiri headed to the library where he routinely did his homework andread up on ideas from the greatest minds of literature like:
Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Tennessee Williams.
He always had hope that he would be as great as them.
With inspiration running through his mind,
spinning down to his finger tips and dripping out his pen,
with unmitigated gall he writes:
“THE GRACE OF MORNING ALIGNED HIS FACE
THE PULSE OF EVENING FORMED HIS SMILES
THE PEAK OF MIDNIGHT COLORED HIS EYES
THE INSTINCTS OF SURVIVAL SCRAPED HIS KNEES
THE PAINS OF LIFE SCARRED HIS WRIST
THE THOUGHTS OF DEATH INTRUDED HIS MIND
THE FEAR OF LOVE STRUCTURED HIS SPINE
THE RESCUE OF THE MORNING SUN GAZED UPON HIS BRUISED,
BLOODY BLACK SKIN KICKING AWAKE HIS COURAGE
TO BREATHE AGAIN.”
AK SAINI
Elegy For A Sex Worker Activist
Haibun In Four Seasons
Summer, 2008
My first few months working in the sex industry I learn most of what I need to know using Google and good sense. I want to step up my game, get that white girl money. I learn (also from Google) about a meeting for “sex worker activists.”
I arrive at a squat sand coloured condo complex, The Towne Inn Suites in Southfield, Michigan where I assume the archaic spelling “towne” of the word “town” signifies to visitors this place is fancy. Or maybe in the context of our meeting Towne referred to Mary Eastey Towne and Rebecca Nurse Towne, sisters executed by their government during the Salem trials for witchcraft.
The unit is packed, main and loft floors, with soccer moms and libertarians. I am the only non-white person. I remember I've seen a client here before but I didn't like the space for turning a trick because it was difficult to track what potential threat lurked below, above, around the corner. Now I find myself similarly disconcerted, but there are snacks here, the curated kind found at bourgeois baby showers hosted by suburbanites. I smash a pretty spinach bobble into my mouth, I am starved, I am not yet making enough money to eat consistent.
My voice box blocked with food I respond when asked about my safe-call with a slow shrug and quick head nod back-and-forth, no, I don't have anyone to contact if I get in trouble. I respond with a quick shrug and a slow head nod up and down, sure, I will contact Sarah D if I get in trouble. I do not ask what Sarah D would do if I got in trouble with ICE, police, rapist and I do not think about how they so often travel all three villains in one; I save her number into my burner phone.
Sun rays on sapling will it to wither or grow without prejudice.
Autumn, 2011
I bust my ass to get that white girl money, bank stacks, move to New York. I bust my ass to volunteer with a sex worker rights organization. I am one of few non-whites, fewer visible people of colour, this time not soccer moms and libertarians but college students and progressives.
I bust my ass with another volunteer to organize a sex worker film festival. It screens to a sold-out audience. No one except the other volunteer emails me with congratulations on a successful event. Sarah J emails asking if I handed off the profits to the appropriate white girl, which is to say, any white girl. The tone of her email is the same used by an employer talking to a maid trusted alone with the good silverware; whose fault is it, really, when the valuables go missing?
I bust my ass to fix things with Sarah J and the rest. I organize a meeting where we will engage in a conflict resolution process but none of them, Sarah J nor the rest, will attend. I bust my ass to consider where busting my ass with Sarah J and the rest has got me and I cancel the meeting. I bust my ass to maintain my resolve against their drama, delete without reply fuming emails from Sarah J and the rest about cancelling the meeting that Sarah J and the rest never planned on attending.
I bust my ass to get a paid community organizing gig. I bust my ass at that gig. They pay me well, not a lot, and they never send me maid trusted alone with the good silverware toned emails.
Crisp crack of harvest apple, thrash of reaper scythe,
indiscerWinter, 2015 – 2016
“I met this unicorn client.” It's a cliche worth noting that if not for Sarah P's referral I would dismiss him as too good to be true. A high roller, paying triple or quadruple market rate for multiple overnights with multiple girls at once, within days of each other. I was thirsty for that white girl money.
I refuse to pop the blackheads on his back. His racism works in my favour, at least, he prefers fucking the pink pussy of the other girl to mine. He demands I lick it for him. Since then I tell lovers licking pussy is a sex act I do not perform anymore. I do not explain why I do not perform it anymore and especially not the anymore.
In the cab ride home from Jersey the next morning Sarah P texts casually there is a problem at the bank but he is working it out. I reply, wait, you didn't get the money up front? I am almost too exhausted to reply, when she says there was no money up front, that means there is no money at all.
I am not angry at Sarah P just disappointed there is no money, she is incompetent in doing anything about it, and she never musters an apology. I am not angry just disappointed she is subsequently named executive director at the sex worker rights organization I helped build. I am angry not just disappointed when she kicks me out of the organization that I helped build, says they are going in a different direction, I am angry and disappointed at this white girl's attempt to orchestrate my rape again.
I snitch to the board of directors that I believe her actions satisfy the legal definition of sex trafficking and this seems like unbecoming conduct for the incoming executive director of a sex worker rights organization. The board agrees, some of them begrudging with cronyism, she is fired and moves to the opposite coast in shame. The organization and its members splinter.
Pulsating beneath ice tombed lake persists the tide beating defiance.
Spring, 2016
In an airport lounge flying back to New York City from a family visit in Toronto I post on the event Facebook page that I will perform my Tale of Two Sarahs. In my seat before take off I hear from a friend that all two Sarahs from said Tale, Sarah P and Sarah J, are pitching a fit about my intended performance.
In the customs line on the other end of my flight I learn via the Facebook event page that I was cut from the line up, a decision made unilaterally by the event organizer, who also claims she is indisposed with a health issue and unavailable for comment or discussion. In a fury I learn that the person deputized to deal with all related comment or discussion, one Sarah S, does not feel herself capable of fielding comment or discussion.
In a haze upon arriving back at my apartment I reach out to some fellow community organizers to ask who might supply me with a bullhorn. In sleep I formulate my plan. In the morning I convince all of my fellow readers to drop out and I recruit supporters to disrupt the performance. In the hopes that I wouldn't have to go through with it, I contact Sarah S to tell her the show will not go on without protest.
In the afternoon the event is postponed indefinitely. In the coming weeks I realize I am done with NYC. In the coming months I move back to Toronto. In the coming years I formally incorporate my hooking business and informally retire from sex worker activism. In time I may return, in the meantime, I get that white girl money.
Naive predator breaks egg, forgets yolk doubles as corpse and fetus.