Speak Your Peace: Caitlin Hoffman

I originally performed this piece at Cha Island in March 2015 for our local Speak Your Peace! event. Everyone was amazing. You shoulda been.

Cunt Talk

Now I know we don’t wanna talk about cunts

‘Cause men fear them which means they fear us


Nobody wants to talk about blood

in the soul or spit

Nobody wants to hear about the times I thrashed against my clit

when I fucked the whole world away and felt

nothing.


Nobody wants to see me look at her to imagine touching her to wonder if I could

these fingers have drawn a thousand lines in my mind yet rarely materialised against thigh

only once or twice and even then

too ashamed to be wet

preoccupied with a million lies like You’re cute when you’re angry I’m good when I do what they tell me I wanna fuck hard and loud and I don’t give a fuck who it is or if it hurts

This body wasn’t mine it belonged to every eye

and when he stuck it in I didn’t cringe. Didn’t cry. Just held my hands against his shirt whispered no once or twice or five times

and we didn’t break up

and I never called it rape.


I was taught guys like good girls who talk dirty, skip foreplay suck first think later ask never sit still stay on top. Swallow bend beg for it so what’s it matter if I did or didn’t like it when sex is centred around the dick I may as well have been a doll but doll’s don’t have scars dolls don’t have acne marks dolls don’t weep into toilet bowls and wonder why they’re ugly

Dolls don’t have ribs pointing out too far

Dolls don’t whisper no.


As I wipe the dirt from my sweet little secrets

I wonder how the world could ever benefit from this

and I worry my words will only hurt or make it worse.


We cannot spark a revolution w/ our tongues

No matter how much they beat against us

for long before we learned to talk they learned to silence us.


I always wanted to be a boy and for a while thought I was

but daddy’s little girl still wore dresses to Sunday School

now looking back I see what I meant to express through this

what was expected of me in a Christian family

I sensed very well who I wasn’t supposed to kiss.


In girls I was meant to find friends and in men an eventual husband

which soon turned to cocks locked with frustrated fingers

fucking so loud so silently

and never finding anything.


Would I have done better abstinent

Would I have done better without regret

Would I have done better loving women

exactly the way I wanted.


Now I know a little too late

Love isn’t a sin but lust is

Just stay with me on this

Lust isn’t desire lust isn’t libido lust isn’t attraction and lust isn’t sex

Lust is what turns us into

meat on heels

the prop they’re gonna tap the hole they’re gonna get

bitch slut dyke fake the names they give us to assume our submission

strip our humanity

the ones that gave excuses for raping slaves.


And I know it hurts to hear, and I still look at her even when she isn’t here

and remember a cunt gushing on my chair

because there between fingers and kiss I sensed something resembling innocence

a feeling I’ve never felt in these lips.


But you don’t wanna hear about her

and you don’t wanna hear that word

you’d rather I keep lying

and say I like it.


--Caitlin Hoffman