Jerry Thompson

 
The Slut
 


You’ll pay with your ass this time around the way I did

With a check and a 25 dollar deposit to secure a safe

Place for kissing made out of who we were and what we

Decided to keep as a reminder of what was given away in

The middle of a three page list of what we  did to destroy

The person we thought we knew and loved for free
 

Jerry Thompson is a bookseller, poet, playwright, and musician. His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA and the James White Review. He is the coauthor of Images of America: Black Artists in Oakland. His fiction and prose have appeared in various anthologies including Voices Rising, edited by G. Winston James, and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, edited by E. Lynn Harris. He is the coeditor of both Oakland Noir and  Berkeley Noir with Owen Hill.