Heady Wine
by Kee'Liya Misti
Is it more devastating to give away the passion of my mind or that of my loins?
Which is more potent? Allowing a man to drink of the wine of my thoughts or the nectar between my thighs?
I know not that which I feel most violated by. To impregnate my mind and heart with indurable sorrow or my womb with a bastard— which is more detrimental to the soul?
To allow you to plague my thoughts with the torture of your departure or the sleep deprivation I experience from the persistent cries of your weeping babe—
Which is more degrading, laying my wit before you— for your unrefined and indiscriminatory eyes to roam over, to pick apart like a vulture dissecting rotting flesh or nursing your illegitimate progeny at my breast— allowing him to sip away my life force— to deplete my youth?
Which is more torturous? Allowing you to intrude on my innermost thoughts— or indulge in my innermost parts?
Venice beneath me
By Kee’Liya Misti
A whore in theory, I call myself—but never in practice, I swear it. I am two women entirely. An amphibian if you will. I’m both the innocent land locked society wife resigned to a stable albeit isolated island—its bones constructed from my good pedigree and classical education. I waste away my days envying the young whorish courtesan and her control over the men in my life and beneath me the bones rot, likened to the decaying stakes under Venice. I am also the beautiful seductress, an enchanting siren fully submerged in the water of the damned, peacocking my overflowing and decadent bounty before the prudent wife whilst waiting tentatively for her city to sink so I may devour her.
I am the revered Madonna—pure, virtuous, and nurturing. An innocent fawn, a graceful swan, and a pious queen sunbathing on the lawn before the temple of maturity. But when no sleuthful eyes gaze upon me, I adorn myself with the raiment of new personhood. Or is it more truthful that I cast off my daytime disguise? Either way, I succumb to my harlotress form, over-sexuality, brattiness, and masochistic desire. The only touchstone traded between the two is the Lady Submission—she is the mother of both and the midpoint where they exchange their slippers.
The wife and courtesan who possess my tormented being are the wretched manifestations of my child self, feigning adulthood—and my soon-to-be adult self, regressing into childlikeness. How perverted is that? That in my mind, the child is the harlot, and the wife the Madonna. The child, me, me as a child, is the sexual being and my future womanhood the Madonna.
When I was a girl and men loved me—or at least fantasized about loving me, claiming my infantile statehood as their own, they loved that I was a child and all that came with my childlikeness, but when I behaved like woman I was quickly cast aside. In my later relations with reasonably aged boys, they adored my being an emerging woman and breasts I shared with their digital conquests and the mothers who conceived them.