From the Perspective of a Prostitute: Written by an Average-Looking American Girl Who Hates Walking By Victoria’s Secret

I look at my skin and see a pallid dish cloth

stained from overuse and too much rinsing.

My hair is snaps and my bones are curl.

Contorting into shapes only seen in center-folds

Night after night after night after night.

What I wouldn’t give for their daily attire

To become formless and billowing in

those heavy robes, cloaking my over-moisturized body.

To become a shadow. Wrap the burka over my shame

looking through mesh and not mascara.

And there isn’t always an eye-covering, sometimes those women are only eyes.

Hands, cloth, and eyes.

1. Eyes

My mother always told me I had beautiful eyes.

Shiny gray, like the clouds’ silver lining.

To remind you to look for good of every circumstance, she’d say.

Somedays, when the sun glinted inside them at just the right angle,

my eyes were pale blue, like the foam of a receding ocean wave.

To remind you that somedays you may feel washed away,

but there will always be another wave to bring you back to shore.

I know you had high hopes for me, Mother.

That you love me for only my eyes, but I hate to break it to you lady,

the world wants more than that from your baby girl.

And I give it to them

Night after night after night after night.

And every morning I feel washed away,

but there hasn’t been a wave to carry me back for a long, long time.

I’m caught in a rip-tide that pierces my side

and the salt water goes in

and spills out of my eyes.

So I think.

Why do those women, across this wave-less ocean,

get to languish behind their veils, knowing

that although they won’t experience our ideal romantic courtship,

or experience any of our ideals, for that matter,

they know that man they have been arranged to marry,

he probably thinks her eyes are lovely. Maybe they’re silver like a cloud, and blue in the sun.

2. Hands

Or maybe her eyes have been covered. Whether by netting or by prison bars,

he has watched her hands. He sees tough, hard-working hands,

beautiful hands,

that will forever serve him and their nation’s God.

Men have seen my hands too I suppose,

though I doubt it has been considered if my hands serve God,

as well as mammon.

My hands are also tough, working in the dark.

And in the morning, also clasped in prayer.

But my hands blend in with the rest of my exposed skin.

3. Body

Those men, you know, the one’s we’re at war with,

we curse them and their bearded scowls and road-side bombs but

they must love their women.

Think about it.

Yes, they take away their speech, their individuality, their free-will

and thats just the beginning of the inhumanity, but to me it seems that the epitome of humanity is respect for the human form itself.

And that is what those women are allowed to keep.

Their form.

Maybe hidden under a burka, but it’s theirs.

Here in this land we have our freedom of speech, our freedom of press, our freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Except freedom of body.

But wait, that is a bad way to put it, because here in this land a women’s body is free.

Free to be exploited. Free to be commercialized, advertised, amplified and digitized.

To be displayed ten-times life size on a public wall

for toddlers to stare and grandmothers to glare.

I cry for the women on that wall.

Because maybe a hundred men have paid for a small piece of my body,

but I remember each time.

The women on the wall will never know how many people carry her body in their head,

how many teenage boys have her on a screen in their pocket.

The masses point fingers at those men across the sea,

saying that they’re the ones who

are trapping their women in a cage.

But perhaps there is something to be learned from the people

we never seem to stop fighting.

Because they must love their women.

They protect them.

Their IED’s blow our tanks, but our lack of sacred appreciation for a woman’s body blows their minds.

I want someone to marry me after only seeing my eyes.

I want their protection.

I want their love.

I want it all.

Without showing my skin.