How This Woman Found Self-Love by Masturbating with the Lights On

The first time I fucked someone with the lights on, I thought it a victory

Reclamation of sorts

Owning my body by showing it to someone else

I had won

The prize was my skin, and I gave it to him

The first time I talked proudly about fucking someone with the lights on, I thought it a second won fight

That a room full of strangers could accept a woman talking about pleasure,

about biting and pulling hair

I never would have thought that they were simply putting themselves in my stories

Not listening, but waiting to speak

I did a poem once about loving blow jobs because, well, I love them

Afterwards, a man comes up and tells me that he wishes more women shared my attitude

The reward of my struggle to finally enjoy sex after violence, after self hate,

is that instead of a man completely tuning me out, he heard one word

The one that involved his body and listened for nothing else

As if my body is the negative space for him to know he exists

As if he can only see the mouth of me

The possibility of entering as if my body seals itself in silence with no foreign hands to coax it out

As if when I come for a lover, it is something only they can make me do

The marionette doll of his fingers,

a flattened force that no one noticed until a man found it

Let me tell you,

when the tree of me falls in orgasm,

it does not matter if there’s no one else there to hear it

I make a goddamned sound

Today, today, I masturbated with the lights on and this was victory

No longer leaving the lights off,

pretending there was someone else there to justify this

I am damn good in bed

That fact does not change just because you are not there to be good for

Every arch, toe twitch, and curl is just as much a dance when I am alone

This is the one woman show,

Rehearsal with no opening night needed

No audience necessary for me to applaud