Appetite by Aaron Smith

Author:Aaron Smith [Smith, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822978459
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

4 • PRODIGAL

We pay for this later. I pay

for breakfast

—TIM DLUGOS

What It Feels Like to Be Aaron Smith

Though you would never admit it, you're still shocked by pubic hair in Diesel ads on Broadway and Houston, and you wonder what conversations lead up to a guy posing with his pants unzipped to the forest. Maybe the stylist does it, but somebody had to think, let's show pubic hair, and was that person nervous about saying, hey, I have a great idea: pubic hair. You think about David Leddick's book Naked Men Too, and the model with the cigarette whose mother photographed him with his jeans falling off and his pubic hair showing and how that's weird and you can't even begin to process how someone would let his own mother photograph him nearly naked and why a mother would want to. Everyone pretends pubic hair in pictures is artistic, but we all know it's really about sex, which you quickly remind yourself is okay, too, because you're liberal, which you sometimes think means you don't believe in anything because you want people to like you. Then you think how you hate the phrase shock of pubic hair in novels and spend the next several minutes trying to think of a better phrase, shrub of…patch of…spread of…taste of…wad of…then you think how Joyce Carol Oates describes fat men's chests as melting chicken fat in her story_____________and get paranoid because you used to be fat and can never get your chest as tight as you want no matter how much you bench press. You make a mental note to send poems to Ontario Review, Joyce Carol Oates is one of the editors and might like your work. They published Judith Vollmer's poem about the reporter covering a murder scene, and you love her and her poems (maybe you should send her an e-mail and see how she's doing). Then you think about pubic hair again, how embarrassing it can be at Dr. Engel's when he examines you and stares at it (do you have too much, how much can you trim and still look natural) both of you trying to pretend it's professional when he asks you to move into the light, holds your penis like a pencil, squeezes your balls, this guy's fine, this guy's fine, and you don't know how to be when he shakes your hand before you leave. Then you feel perverted because you're still thinking about pubic hair, maybe everyone has pubic hair issues and nobody talks about it? You know for a fact Laura does because she told you after she read a Sharon Olds poem out loud and the two of you giggled. You think of Tara, with thick eyeliner, who said well-groomed underarms are really sexy and you adopted that phrase when you say you think underarms are sexy, well-groomed underarms you say and friends agree, especially Tom who also loves underarms and sex clubs. You pass a hot guy (not as hot as

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