Services Not Bodies

Let's workshop this poem about how sex work is real work (from which not all women need rescue)!

Services Not Bodies 

Hockey players and boxers
sell their bodily services (yes, 
even at risk of deadly injury),

yet it is a moral atrocity—
a savagery from which women 
need a Portlandia missionary 

(often guitar-playing, bearded, 
white)* to rescue them—
when prostitutes do the same?

*You know the type: searches
your eyes as you speak, nodding 
with prayer hands and head tilted

in concern; opens Zoom sessions 
with “I ask that persons of color
be given a chance to speak first”; 

hugs in true pity black coworkers 
with a teary “I’m here for you”
after news of black death by cop.

This poem is unpublished

Photo: newyorker.com/news/dispatch/after-the-closure-of-backpage-increasingly-vulnerable-sex-workers-are-demanding-their-rights