Why I Won’t Have Sex With You

If you really want to know, it’s because my thighs are too big. They slump across the bed, too heavy to move apart, but slightly, at the knees. Waves of cellulite lolling across seas and seas of undesired flesh. Mapped out by white webs of stretch marks, this wide expanse spills out of your grip, easily.

I doubt if you would want to graze your fingers across a bedimpled, blotchy crack. I have trouble lifting my legs up for the perfect position (around your neck, perhaps, or my left knee hugged to my chest) because of this unwieldy weight, and I am so afraid to disappoint you. How your sweat drips down your brow in this great effort to get me to take my pants off.

I try to distract you by sitting up, but my stomach rolls forward too fast and loose, to my dismay. I lie back down thinking, sex belongs to skinny people: the stick figures with melon boobs I know you fantasize about. I try not to bite my lip as you go down on me: I fail to keep a moan that half-arcs across this dark and sad motel room.

I feel too big for the bed, too ugly for these mirrors, unworthy of this pleasure that I feel. I want to envelope your body with mine, enclose your being, but I fear losing you. I am too thick and oily: what if you suffocate within my folded flesh?

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Why I Won’t Have Sex With You, published in Eros Pinoy: An Anthology of Contemporary Art and Poetry (Anvil, 2001) and UNIBERSO: New Pinoy Poets Calling (2002).