Ode for Everyone Else’s Fantasies

Dorothy Chan

First published in Salt Hill 39 (2017).

It’s such a sex circus how James Bond makes love
to women in round beds, on yacht decks,
in hotel rooms with golden carts of caviar
and champagne and foie gras nearby,
as we clink our glasses watching cinema
of women plotting against men the second
they enter in a limo and evening gown
or ride in fancy trains with so much leg room
I’m already suspicious by the time
they’re served lollipop lamb chops, or how they
fly in private jets and join the mile-high club,
though the villains with eyepatches
are strangling the pilots in the cockpit
and we fly to Tokyo where Michiko lies nude,
covered with leaves on a sushi table:
tako and toro and fatty tuna all over her body
as the businessmen barely ogle, but we know
what they’re thinking since one of them
pulled out a tentacle porn manga in the train
an hour earlier, no one batting an eye.
And the dinner table next door has another beauty
with another set of sushi, and the one next door,
a beauty with even longer hair, scallop sushi
over her breasts because businessmen are so
predictable in their fantasies—everyone is so
predictable in their fantasies, which is why
an American reality show circa mid 2000s
presents the same scenario, though this time,
a man of the house goes insane from the Japanese
spectacle in front of him. Maybe he’s mad
at the tackiness of luxury, like how the male
strippers in that one documentary turn into
sparkling Adonises and Poseidons and Parises
as the club goers drink cheap red wine—
and well, Hollywood, if you’re going to be so tacky,
well, I’ll take my fantasy of a gorgeous shirtless man
cooking ramen in the kitchen, us drinking sake,
over glittering go-go dancers any day.

Dorothy Chan is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Poetry Editor of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary.