I have a problem: I don’t feel sexy when I shave and I don’t feel sexy when I don’t. Sometimes, I shave anyway so I can look at myself better, feel how smooth I am to touch. Most of the time, I don’t. Don’t want a full bush, a gorgeous woman on reality TV once told me, or else men get lost down there. (I’m queer, but that’s beside the point.) I do, I said to the TV screen, wishing she’d get it. I like feeling feral. I like it when my body hides. I like how shame, waiting patiently to be noticed, can slip privately through my mass of pubic hair. Bikinis and lingerie complicate things; there’s not enough room to hide. To (un)dress as a woman is to like being bare— plus I’m not bold enough to approach a new lover unshorn. I sometimes half wish I didn’t need a body, but it always comes back to how the body, at night, a hand between my legs, is too good to give up. Perhaps this is the problem: by myself, pleasure of the flesh is a simple thing. It tells me I can make my body softer than shame. It tells me this: the woman I am for tonight, shaved or unshaved, touched by many or myself alone, will be as sweet as each imagines the other to taste.
Joanna Cleary (she/her) is an emerging queer artist and recent graduate of the University of Waterloo. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Hunger, Gordon Square Review, Always Crashing, Apricity Press, Digging Through The Fat, Typehouse Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, Funicular, Canthius, Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, and Mascara Literary Review, among others.
Featured Artwork:
Un Ballet
Beth Horton holds degrees in creative arts therapy, sociology, and majored in health science at Niagara University, located near Buffalo, New York. Her love for art began as a small child, watching her father paint into the wee hours of the morning. In addition to abstract art, Beth enjoys photography, mixed-media composition and illustration.