(wo)Men Without Women

I understand why
some dolls
sleep with men,
desire to be desired by them.
It’s as if instead of being
various sized fishes in a pond,
women are the water itself,
the blue itself,
and to be desired
is to be clear,
is to be able to see down to the mossy boulders
from the surface,
from what rides on top of us,
parting us and leaving a wake.

I’m sure the dolls and Murakami and Hemingway
have paragraphs they would like to tell me
about the sadness of men without women,
about mysterious phone calls from lover and
bars with cats as their only patrons.

But I was always in love with the warmest color
and my type was always blonde with an e and unavailable
⏤and then blonde with and e and pink and red and very available.
There is still the feeling of hyper-transparency,
the desire to be desired.
The water can still be clear;
it just becomes more of an operation
of the ever-reaching expanse of womanhood itself.

Women without women then
are water without water,
missing their polarity,
as incomprehensible to
men without women and women without men
as the ocean to the fish.