torrin a. greathouse | The Preacher Screaming "Yoga Pants are Sin"

torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer, cripple-punk from Southern California. They are the Editor-in-Chief of Black Napkin Press. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Duende, Apogee, Lunch Ticket, & Assaracus. They are a 2016 Best New Poets, Bettering American Poetry, and Pushcart Prize nominee, and semifinalist for the Adroit Poetry Prize. torrin's first chapbook, Therǝ is a Case That I ∀m, is forthcoming from Damaged Goods Press in 2017.

Black Napkin Press.

Also by torrin a. greathouse: In Which the Poet Wakes Up a Birthday Candle & Never Becomes Smoke Cornflake Girl Self-Portrait as Preexisting Conditions

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Self-portrait as Daedalus, Writing the First Draft of His Autobiography On the Midnight Sky, Fireworks Calling to Us Like a Mother in the Distance

June 2017

torrin a. greathouse

The Preacher Screaming "Yoga Pants are Sin"

calls me sinner sodomite / eyes my red lips & how they paint my mouth into a door [& this is meant to ward off death] but i have swallowed so many bodies felt them die / on the tip of my tongue i want to tell him about the man twice my age how i lined my throat with his cock like silk how cum spilled over his chest in the thin light & looked like mercury poison / i would have gladly swallowed [& this is how i paid the rent] i want to tell him that i was visited by an angel / wings of sweat & liquid metal staining pale suede hear him call me faggot / whore call my body city razed for sin & i will remind him that this city burned for refusing solace / locked doors splitting into crimson flames [i paint my lips red / leave them gaping / on their hinges / & name this / salvation]

I've been in a space lately where I have been thinking about survival a lot. Survival, and the shame that comes along with it. We place a lot of value behind wealth and success in America, but very little behind struggling simply to exist. A lot of this piece is deconstructing my own shame around sex work as a tool for survival, as well as a rejection of religious values that act to oppress sexually liberated bodies, particularly queer and femme bodies. There is an importance in re-appropriating the misappropriations of biblical stories constantly undertaken by "Christian" sects, in making holy from that which they name sin.

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