Laser by Jackie Sabbagh

The technician named Jessica tucks away her honey-mustard hair and says Let’s party,
grinning as she rubs a damp sanitary cloth across my shameful, holy face.
Easy life—glance at the ceiling lamp like a beagle at the sun, obliterate
your stubborn subdermal beard, pass as a girl, be loved by anyone who surprises you.
Jessica grips her ominous laser-wand like a pistol, hands me a stress ball colored like Earth.
I don my tiny Soviet-spy goggles to protect my useless retinas, and Jessica begins.
Mother, it’s like being stabbed by a billion little god-rays of blue fire.
Mommy, I am trying to be beautiful, and I do not think it’s working.
The roots of me incinerate like some microscopic transexual forest-fire.
Cheeks wet with tears, I croak—Jessica, you are the biggest fucking cunt in Somerville.
She giggles like a female alien, inhales serenely, and says Thank you.
She removes my glasses, lets in the bright room of a merciless life, and in my hands
is the mangled world, oceans strewn from grass, green patterns of continent cloven from foam.
I spy the flaccid tongue of Florida in the jagged remains, wonder if I’ll ever feel at home.
Jessica squeezes my knee, hands me the insatiable moon, and says Balls next.

Jackie Sabbagh is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in publications including Ninth Letter, Subtropics, Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, and POETRY, which awarded her poems the Frederick Bock prize.