Andrew Ketcham

Boring Dudes screwing Me

—Please if you think you are that person, go fuck yourself. That person does not exist.

Kristin Sanders, Orthorexia

Nothing mattered before it began.

One day, a man looked at you

and it felt for the first time you

could understand the human body

made of pieces.

They were everywhere.

Dividing like cells.

A million and one men taking stock of you.

Taking your photograph and measurements

and things you had no right

or brains to give.

Capturing you.
Regarding you as captivating.

You took even more back.

That’s what you say.

How you’re still taking so much from them.

The man who can’t fuck you long enough.

The man who can’t fuck you hard enough.

The man who puts too many fingers in your mouth

and too much of himself in the rest of you.

The man on the couch.

The man on the floor.

The men in a flooded park

where the trees smell like cum after midnight.

The man who spits blood.

The men with brown teeth.

A man on the moon

and the pack that hunts you beneath it.

Men who spoil.

Who smell of mustard and meat.

There’s old men, a lot of them.

There’s very sad men, almost all of them.

Men with mustaches and chest hair.

Men with very little of anything at all.

The man who brings beatings.

The man you beg a beating from.

The men who give chase with chainsaw

and the men who dodge your blade.

Men who are pious.

Men who kneel to enter you.

Men accustomed to witchcraft

and men who want it burnt.

There was the man who almost fucked me

in a way that made sense.

That was me.

Go fuck yourself,

that man does not exist.

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Statement of Homage 

Twelve years ago, during my freshman year of undergrad at Loyola University New Orleans, an administrative error placed me in a senior-level poetry workshop with Kristin Diane Sanders. Immediately, she suggested the course might be too intense for an 18-year-old. But I was so starstruck by her. And a little stubborn. I asked her to let me stay for two weeks. I went to my tiny dorm room that always smelled like wet boy and googled her. I read most of “Orthorexia” that night. That summer I was published for the first time because of that class, and because of her. This year, this poem will appear in my debut chapbook because of that class, and because of her. We’ve gotten drunk on martinis together and talked about sex and porn and the internet and people we don’t like and living abroad and all the boring dudes trying to screw us and about having children or not having children and how in the end I sort of ended up her poetry son anyway. So to my other mother, here’s another type of Mother’s Day poem.

Kristin Sanders

Kristin Sanders is a writer, editor, and educator. She is the author of Cuntry, a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series, the chapbooks This is a map of their watching me and Orthorexia, and the e-book The Science of Women Getting Rich: A Feminist Revision. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitch Magazine, The Guardian, and various online and print literary journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University and a BA in English from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She lives in Paris.

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