A short list of things to Know if you are Considering fucking me
1) I don’t like biting into watermelons. It reminds me of sex. But in a bad way.
2) I know how to make four different cocktails. They all involve gin. One of them I made up myself.
3) The first time I had sex with a boy, I wasn’t sure whether or not we had actually done it. I was too embarrassed to ask him about it afterwards. So I just told all of my friends that we had.
4) There was a point in my life when I had a crush on George Bush.
5) Let me re-phrase that. There was a time in my life when I had crushes on both Bush men. Junior and senior.
6) I can sing all of the songs on the Julio Iglesias record Mexico. But I don’t speak Spanish.
7) I always pay the water bill late.
8) I never laugh at the jokes in The New Yorker.
9) Whenever I go in for a pap smear and the doctor asks if I’m ready for the speculum, I always say, sure, but if we had at least gone out for a glass of wine first. Twenty years of the same joke. Have yet to make a gynecologist laugh.
10) I like to try as many different things as I can because I know I am going to die.
11) I’m not afraid of spiders.
12) When my last boyfriend left me for a 25 year old I wanted to kill every woman I saw who looked to be that age. This lasted for six weeks.
13) I’ve always had a little bit of a nose fetish.
14) If I had a magic potion and could be turned into anyone else, I would either be Robert Redford in All The President’s Men, Madeline Albright, Edith Piaf, or Medea
An incomplete list of bizarre theories The Ancient Greeks had regarding the Female body
1) In the Aphorisms, Hippocrates explains that if a woman gets a nosebleed then it is a sign that her period will start soon.
2) Same is true if she vomits blood.
3) Although not a physician, Aristotle believed that women have fewer teeth than men.
4) It was a wide-spread belief in Greece that a woman’s throat extended down to and became her vagina. This was called a ὁδός (hodos.)
5) Congestion of blood in the breasts is a sign of impending madness.
6) If the winter is dry, women will get fevers.
7) Women’s menstrual blood contains milk.
8) When pregnant, the milk cooks.
9) When on her period a woman is able to:
……..put curses on plants
……..dim the brightness of mirrors
……..drive dogs into madness
……..stop thunder and lightning
……..kill swarms of bees.
11) The word hysteria comes from the Greek word ὕστερα meaning “uterus.” Historically, women who were thought to be overly aggressive, openly expressed the desire to have sex, were too emotional, or were not interested in getting married, were classified as hysterical.
12) There is a Depeche Mode fan club based in Greece called Hysterika. Founded in Athens in 1990, it is the biggest Depeche Mode fan club in the world. I took at a look at their website, but it is all in Greek. And I don’t speak Greek.
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Ann Pedone graduated from Bard College and has a Master’s Degree in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. Ann is the author of the chapbooks The Bird Happened (Leave Books, 1991) and perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho. (Cup and Dagger Press, 2020.) Her work has recently appeared in multiple journals including Riggwelter, Big City Lit, Contemporary Verse 2, The Phare, West Trade Review, The Open Page Literary Journal, Slipstream, Rogue Agent, The French Literary Review, SAND, and The Shore.