Poem by

ROSE HUNTER

BIO

Rent Day

—But why write about it now
a decade after I stopped, two
decades after I started?

I feel heavy in my morning boots

or after-lunch boots, forget

the end of the day, no way

to look at it by then

in the marina with shadows of boats, blanket

stitching the water under

hulking shoulders of emerald

Sierra Madres, wraparound balcony and me

overlooking the other window dwellers

strolling, biking, having brunches

alongside the sweepers, the watchers, the waiters

the crocodile-braving pleasure-boat cleaners

the sign of the cross before they dive in

the murky water underneath

really, humanity

and what I’m doing, voluntarily

recounting can feel like reliving

the distance between those days and now

(the functional buffer)

disappears and I am back

in that parlour near Yonge and

Hayden, those names pop up

like from behind a memory hedge

also strange

in their neutrality; do you see how place names

and dates (etc.), are easier

to record

not like in the room

with the crack between the wall and ceiling, a fault

that beckoned

this way

as though I could

vaporise

drift-squeeze

up and out

into the lounge, with couches like shabby tongues

and coffee table rubbish pile: celebrity

romances, day-old silt, straws

gondola-oared out of opaque

paper cup hats, lipstick stained

fuchsia or red slick rain

(I am out there now), but man

rent day

and only one thing he’ll pay

for: this man, balding, avuncular, the sort

you could picture, aproned, barbecuing

while kids play in the pool; but it’s me whose blue

underwear around one ankle, like a soft cuff

and on the table with smile like

my usual

what he can take it to mean: he’s hot, the situation

is hot, how could it

be other; on the table with smile like

looking forward to this; on the table with

bile like, chartreuse and oxblood brown

wave breaks, the foaming

disintegration, throat-sharp and spilled-chemical

catastrophe

as he dips his head, mouth

front teeth with yawning diastema

a sign of good fortune I’d been told

or read it somewhere, maybe in one of those

coffee table magazines; focusing on

details

that are also not

the main point

(is helpful here).

Looking for thoughts

in the form of desperate

distractions

where did they go

get out get out get out get out

OK then frantic pop songs

frantic

(playing in my mind)

when will it end when will it end when willlll

please end please end please end

while I pretended to

enjoy it

sure it

wasn’t convincing but no one

cares

(I pause on that fact now, like I didn’t then)

how that’s what

I want you to enjoy it

OK, no question mark

means.

Trying to sit up

Yeah you want me, he says, you want my dick

I know you do

and yes yes of course

I do (get him off means

get him out), but his hands

pushing me back down

dragging it out

me laugh-pretending like I did by then

without thinking

Yeah you want me

please end please end please end

I mean mm-hmm yes

and laugh-pretend—I:

am right back there.

A decade

I’ve tried to write this book

a decade of stowing it back away

time’s wheels move like buggy wheels

through the molasses of the slowest of the slow

brothel and parlour shifts

I type something.

I stare at it.

I stare at something else.

The clouds roll in, the strolling window

dwellers pop umbrellas

the workers scramble and

shout. There’s no reason for me to write all this

they say

but I know there is.

There’s no reason for me to claim all this

they say

why not cast it as fiction

(how shiny your life can look these days

if you just leave the past

out? Relatively

shiny). Or be vague about it at least

maybe it’s fiction, maybe it’s not

(flirt with it, you know how to do that, right?).

Therapy, no; retraumatisation, no

at least not deliberately.

That there is value in testimony

because so many speak about us, for us, and as us

tell us what our experiences are

what they mean, and what this industry is

that there is value in the truths that poetry can seek

how it can take in all the me’s

and what they know before they know it

for example

because now I can address you directly

ask you where you’ve been, what you’ve seen

and maybe (if you want)

you can tell me all

* “I can address you directly” (in final stanza): taken from Amber Dawn, “Every Time a Sex Worker is Written About in an Institutional Form, a Poem Dies,” in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, edited by Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019. ebook, p. 18–19.

BACK TO HOPE