Bonsai Bondage: Sex Work in Little Tokyo
- Bonsai Bondage:Sex Work in Little Tokyo
The purposes of bonsai are primarily (consumption for the voyeur) and the pleasant (business) of effort and ingenuity (for the trafficker). Bonsai practice focuses on long-term (clientele) and (grooming) of one or more small trees growing in a (brothel). A (whore) is created beginning with a specimen of source (trauma): this may be a cutting, a (repressed memory), or small (trespass) of a (safeword) suitable for (submissive) development.
1. Gather the cuttings
You've picked me
out of a phone book. I'm so honored.
Behold my smile I slip
off / turn on, earnest
to merge; lock these
legs, clip me.
2. Style: wire, prune, bury in finery
Stockings, veins, emaciated,
corseted, coifed, cuffed, rubbered,
premature & cheap & desirable.
In need of support, wired,
buzzing, pre-performance jitters. [End Page 347]
Hand over your green honey,
green leaves folded, fanned,
fisted.
3. Cultivate and perfect the shape
Sap; any man
can become a priest because all men
love secrets, hearing & making
& growing, hateful children inked
between our legs. I'll wipe
them away with my tongue, tattooed with
my eyes on your hands. [End Page 348]
T.m. Lawson is a writer and poet living in Los Angeles. She has been published in Los Angeles Review, Entropy Magazine, Poets.org, and has forthcoming publication in the Nomadic Journal and White Stag. She is a 2015 Academy of American Poets prize winner and a 2016 Thompson Prize winner. She can be reached at tinalawson@ucsd.edu.
