Someone on the internet tells me, “If we ever meet, I will lovingly degrade you.” Someone I don’t know but want to. I don’t know my own father. Not the way he wanted to be known, not even the way I wanted him. Every time I have sex I am leaving the town I was born in again and for good. Every time I walk into a bedroom I pretend to be someone I’m not interested in talking about in poems. The first man who kissed me also put his entire fist in my mouth. The last man inside me wouldn’t even kiss me. I am always inside me. I am always inside. I will lovingly degrade myself. I will lovingly degrade myself for you. I will degrade myself, reader. For you. I will be loving.
24 The Paris-American
Alex Dimitrov's first book of poems, Begging for It, will be published this March by Four Way Books. His poems have been published in the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and Boston Review. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Award from the American Poetry Review, founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City, and the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly earlier this year. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.
