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TOMASELLI AWARD, Winner

POETRY

by Julia Colombo

Before you failed your driver’s test 

you asked if I would suck your dick while you drove. 

I said no, and let me tell you, I smiled so big when you failed 

I felt like Edna Mode with fire reflecting in her glasses 

when she shows ElastiGirl that her super suit 

can withstand one thousand degreeeees 

and I swore I’d never ride with you alone. 

But when your mom and aunt went in Walmart 

and you said we’d stay in the car 

you got that “road head”,  

my head bobbing and spit dripping,  

then you covered the mess with your boxers. 

When we worked for my family one summer 

painting walls in my stepdad’s apartment building, 

you decided the walls weren’t interesting enough 

and decided I should be painted instead.  

Hands grew bristles coated in thick white goop, 

and like a really horny Picasso, 

painted my hair, my ass, my thighs, between them, 

anywhere you wanted 

until my stepdad walked in and you went back to work. 

But, like, I wanted someone to be obsessed with me. 

And weren’t you? 

Or were you obsessed with possessing me? 

It’s not like I ever said no. 

One time I tried. I told you most of our  

sexual encounters were rape-adjacent. 

(Fifteen year old girls in conservative towns don’t learn 

the term sexual coercion until they go to 

free campus therapy their first year of college.) 

You cried, of course. Insisted you never forced me. 

If you don’t want to, why don’t you say no? 

I had to fight microwaved ramen trying to slither 

its way out of my stomach when you took off my 

t-shirt twenty minutes later.