Nothing Stinks Like Lust in a Young Woman
art by Virgil Suárez
by Hajer Requiq
Nothing stinks like lust
in a young woman.
My cannibal heart is drunk
on its own blood.
For nearly thirty years,
it’s eaten nothing but shame.
Today, it sits in my chest
like a hump on a hunchback,
useless and heavy.
I am still teaching the tornados
in my body
to turn into summer breeze.
My last lover couldn’t make it
past my mouth.
My Cerberus tongue
howling and yowling
at the gate,
his manhood sagged,
and between his legs,
I could see a Heracles,
limp and defeated,
black out.
O Mother,
mother of all mothers,
the first time I bled into adulthood,
the Devil festered inside of me.
Even my heart reeked
of his pus.
Now, I stand at your feet
with stakes in my soul:
Satan’s dentures
Even thee cannot tweeze
the Devil out of me!
O Mother,
I wish my heart
were as selfless as thine,
but I’m already so full of myself,
so full of rising water
kindness floats like a streak of oil.
Sometimes, I am afraid
of the god in the tumult of my heartbeat,
in the friction of my thighs,
in the clack of my heels.
I do not hear him anywhere else,
and I will not pray for any other deity.
O Father,
I wish you hadn’t run out of still water
when you were making me.
No one besides you knows this —
I was born looking so much
like my next victim
it terrifies me.
Hajer Requiq is an emerging female poet from Tunisia, who has recently been selected as a finalist in the 2025 *Lucky Jefferson* Poetry Contest, as a finalist in the 2025 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and shortlisted for the 2025 Foster Poetry Prize. She has also been selected as the runner-up for the "Connective, Uncontainable" Fall 2025 Writing Contest by TheCapilano Review, as highly commended in the 2026 Cúirt New Writing Prize, and longlisted for the 2025 Gearhart Poetry Contest by Southeast Review. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland, Chestnut Review, and OnlyPoems, among others.
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently 90 MILES: SELECTED AND NEW, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. His 10th volume of poetry, THE PAINTED BUNTING’S LAST MOLT, was be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2020. He is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and an Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida and a Latino Book Prize.
