A Little Flesh, A Little History
By Jennifer Perrine
on my first visit with my partner’s family
one uncle offers an offhand comment
noting with a wink how many girls he met
on business trips to thailand every massage
ending with a little extra for those who could pay
i can’t tell if this nostalgia
nags at him or if he’s mentioned this purely
to put me in my place i keep forgetting
i have a race but of course i learned early
on the street at the mall once in the library i
got asked while holding my white father’s hand
where we met if i was a mail order
honey a pretty young thing
brought back from the war in those small
towns where i grew into a teen i needed to do
nothing to be seen as every man’s
imported dream a spray of orchids in my hair
trill of a bamboo flute for them to follow
no matter where i went the image the soundtrack
played over me as if i were a
body in an anatomy text transparent
acetate printed tinted each layer
a gateway to shape the barest bones
into a woman’s form
nude or naked depending on who was doing the looking
all those inquisitors
got it wrong i was never anyone’s mistress or bride
if i knelt if i took the deep bow
kowtow once meant respect
if i knock my head to the ground perhaps this is reverence
or rage if i was always wise
beyond my years looked grown for my age
keep guessing my price the cost
of a country a whole continent owned and lost
About the Author
Jennifer Perrine is the author of four award-winning books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their recent poems, stories, and essays appear in New Letters, The Seventh Wave Magazine, JuxtaProse, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they co-host the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach creative writing to youth and adults, and serve as a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) consultant. To learn more, visit www.jenniferperrine.org.
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists
Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”
All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.