In some galleries I’ve visited,

people who don’t know what to say to a painting

might murmur, “It must be hard to do that.”

Perhaps that’s all you meant back then,

that suffering was something, after all.
The truth is, we never touched.

I remember deleting nudes from my phone,

so you could scroll through it.

I knew you wanted me gone.
Once, I would have let you eat the softest part of my wrist.

But if I pictured your genitalia at all,

I thought it must be cruelly veined like a horse’s neck,

something I would wash with warm soap

and fingertips, like I was holding a fishhook.