Donald Pasmore

Fuck Elegy

the rain fuck-shaped where you are
—Bob Hicok

No matter, you close your eyes and your skin
knows the heat of the engine, and this shot
synthetic sperm isn’t him, no matter the voice
pressed into your skin, which isn’t really
skin because you’ve been degloved
with sand and yes, the wind rubs your skin
no matter the company or how many times
you say no. Skin isn’t all we are but everything goes
back to skin, your kisses in skin and lies in skin, if there is
an eschatology it would have
code in your skin just like the not-skin molding
into your skin. He said no matter, he loved
your skin before and now he won’t
tell you, won’t even give you his
skin which becomes the machine
replica of skin. You’re not to think
about skin, how your skin felt his skin like glass
about to break and scour your skin, how his inside
skin felt more like home than your skin, how your
inside skin felt more like his skin, and fuck
skin. Say no matter. To you, skin has become an absence
bearing absences and you wish you could go back to wishing
for skin, back to skin within skin and pretend
there was no matter, only shapeless atoms of skin touching
skin, or else those times when sweat bathed
your skin like the rain and you didn’t know electricity
had always been fabricated, the same as skin.

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Donald Pasmore (he/she) works as Editor-in-Chief of 149 Review and is on the editorial staffs of Poet Lore, Third Coast and The MacGuffin. He won the 2026 Frostic Award in Poetry judged by Jericho Brown and his debut chapbook, Dulled Bodies, was a finalist for the 2025 Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, Cider Press Review, Harpur Palate, storySouth, Laurel Review and others. She can be found at donaldpasmore.com.