The Men Who Loved My Body (And the Things They Said)

By Caleb Luna

He asks me about my first time
‘I think I was 23. It was a first date’

‘You didn’t wanna wait?’
He tells me about his
He was 21
With a woman he loved
‘Yeah, well
wouldn’t that have been nice?’
‘Wouldn’t that have been nice?’
‘You’re so confident’ he
tells me
(Did you think I needed you to love me before
I could love myself?)
He fucks me
and leaves

‘I love your body,’
He says
‘Can I ask–
How did you get
so big?’
‘Did you have to try?’
‘Do you like it?’
And
He’s cute; I think he’s really cute
I love his round belly and the
softness of his fur
I don’t think to ask him how
his body got this way because his
is just a body
(Earlier he tells me of the men who
won’t leave him alone
‘I like the attention,’
he says
‘That must be nice,’
I think—
‘to be just a body’)

I suck his dick in the back
of his car in the Whataburger parking lot,
my adult adolescent phase
When I sit up I see a cop car
in the drive thru
‘I have to go’
I tell him

‘How did you get so big?’
He asks
‘Did you have to try?’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Does it make you feel sexy?’
‘Can I make you bigger?’
After he cums I
leave and
Never hear from him again

“You have a new message!”
I open the app and this
stranger greets me with simply
‘Wanna get fucked?’
I think of all the funny things
to tell him like,
‘No, thank you,
I just finished a big burrito’
Which is the truth
or
‘Yes, but
not by you’
Which is also
the truth
Instead I ignore and
unmatch
How thrilling it is to
be on the deciding end
for once, but
I know this isn’t about my body
He will find another one,
I’m sure

The men who love my body and the
things they said
I wanna ask,
‘How many of us will you fuck but
never hold our hand in public?’
‘How many bellies will you rub while
telling us you’re worried about our ‘health’?’
‘What have you internalized?’ and
‘What jokes do you let slide?
‘How do you use our marginal
social positions and scarcity of
opportunities to
help you get laid while
never thinking twice
about us?’
‘How many of us will you
fuck and leave?’
‘How come I am a fetish and
Chris Evans is not?’
‘Do your friends know you like fat guys’ and
‘Why not?’

The men who love my body will
gawk at and caress and ask me,
Try to justify their lust with
perverse inquiries disguised as compliments
and they never ask me
‘What’s it like for you when
you leave this room?’
‘Do you remember the first person to call you fat
like its a bad thing?’
and
‘How many times did it have to happen
before it stopped hurting?’
‘Can you even count?’
‘Did it ever stop?’
They never ask
‘What happened to you that
you won’t believe me when I
tell you you’re sexy?’ or
‘What pain are you carrying?’ and

‘How do you find the strength to go on?’