by Diamond Forde

“hoes said they wish a bitch would, & I’m a genie” -Megan Thee Stallion


ain’t got much ass but I’ma grip it
make him catch it with his hips
two of us ridin’ to the music I puppet
through my dips real hot girl shit
liquored & liking the magic I cast
when I throw it back fat & nasty
bought a floor length mirror just to catch myself
in its glances this heft this happiness
Megan you mother an era of girls
taught them to be savage
& scholar to admire their long pink
tongues—loud girls large girls
you knew before it happened
that men stay tryna make us dance
but we twerkin’ for our damn selves
musty bullet-proof unrepentantly hot


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Diamond Forde is the author of Mother Body, with Saturnalia Books. She is a Callalloo and Tin House Fellow whose work has appeared in Obsidian, Frontier Poetry, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and more. She currently lives in Asheville, NC with her partner and their dog.

by Diamond Forde

As a girl, I fingered the penises
in Momma’s copy of The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies,

a habit, dragging my finger while I studied
blister and boil, admiring the penis’s profile

glossed in primary colors, or the uterus, a red yawn
widening, those doodles, my most detailed lesson

of the bellow below my belt, the grammarless
clamor of sex, of blood, of a mother

who I would one day see in this exhibit,
her belly a cabinet shelving the striations of her bell-

shaped uterus. In a month’s time, I will be slit
sinew from skin, doctors clefting the webbed

fat wickering my womb, then snip
my fibrous knots, I must admit then

it will be the only way my uterus is worthy
of exhibition, my muscular cauliflower

so unlike the drawings thumbed
on my childhood floor, my uterus lumped, bruised.

When the anesthetic quilts over me
I will dream, as I witnessed, what could be:

ovaries polished as jade stone, the glossy bauble
of my fundus, wonder clutched in a perfect wound.

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Diamond Forde is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her debut book, Mother Body, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books in Spring 2021. She is the recent recipient of the Furious Flower Prize and a Tin House and Callaloo fellow. Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Tinderbox Journal, and more.