Georgine, I’ve Got to Get a Grip
- Nov 21, 2023
- 3 min read
by Leia K. Bradley
Georgine, maybe it’s monetary — my insecurities on dating the fairer of the dyke genders, the softer one, femme for femme for ephemeral, for efflorescent, for lace and silk and lately I’m dreaming in doppelgangers, I’m a question mark in stilettos staring at question marks in platform boots I am muse and fury, furious at myself, fearful of mouthing truths my body can’t bear. Is it enough to drink a bottle of orange wine in pink sheets, is it enough to offer you tarot cards and tantric poetry, I offer you this ribcage; you could wear it, perhaps, as a fascinator, live robins singing from your scalp —
I want to provide. I want to lay possibilities down at your feet, Georgine. My failure to do so is a failure of me is a failure of all the butches I’ve ever loved who promised me things they could not give. Georgine, I am tired of banks fisting everything, tired of knowing lack of capital is loss of time, of memories able to be made, of food eaten, of possibilities of home. Don’t you know I just want to pour box wine into my hands and bring it to your cupid’s bow? I want the kind of fathomless that has your name in in the lining of each white blood cell winding through my veins I want to cut open my jugular, answer to your teeth — you will never have to ask, you will only know you can drink.
Georgine, I only had that Super 8 Motel threesome with you on your boyfriend’s birthday because I wanted to kiss you — you broke up with him not long after that & that was almost a decade ago, and I’m still out here dating butches and for what! Because I’m too poor to provide? I am trying to give a girl a home but maybe I’ve got to stop being everything for everyone. I’m not even one thing for me.
Rowan says I don’t have to hold up the whole world to be enough for her, but I can’t bring myself to explain why I know I’m not enough for any femme, especially her — she writes poems about ritual baths and homemade bread, she deserves a warmth where I only have leviathans of lack masquerading, deceitful, as calm, opaque water. I’m not enough to keep such a full, radiant heart, weighty with easy joy, afloat.
No, Georgine, I’ll never feel my body is enough to bear words like surefire, foundation, cornerstone; how could I carry us? How can any definition of me be sure enough that she’d stick around to see if any of my names could match with her idea of me — if I can’t even be close to someone’s here and now, how could I be moving truck, china patterns, three cat garage? I don’t even know if I want that, or if I’ll make it to next month. I can’t be her lighthouse the way I want. I’m the drunk idiot sea captain that sinks the whole barge. Georgine, maybe it is monetary, but I can’t bring myself to call her back, so I’ll walk away. She should be with someone ready, someone better, and yes, I’m on four hours of sleep, but I am right — you can’t say money doesn’t make things easier, more true, so I’ll sit on my kitchen floor, catless, eating ice cream in winter letting the names live in the poems and nowhere else real.
Leia K. Bradley (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer and performance artist and an MFA Writing candidate at Columbia University, where she also was awarded the Undergraduate Writing Teaching Fellowship for 2023–24. She has work in Poetry Project, Aurore, Wrongdoing, Ghost City, Versification, JMWW, Wild Greens, Peach Fuzz, and more, with her poem “Settle(d)” chosen as the Editor’s Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine’s 2022 Pride issue. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley or instagram @MadameMort.
