KARYN IN RETROGRADE

My name is Karyn Smyth and this is not a dating profile bio.

Yes, I’ve seen the memes. Haha, very funny. Stop asking, asshole. My name is Karyn with a y, always has been, didn’t need to change it. I’m not like those Karens with e’s. I’m different. I’m unique. Allow me to explain.

First of all, I drive a pristine maroon GMC truck with a beautiful camper shell and a maroon PT Cruiser with fake wood paneling, also pristine. One vehicle represents my masculine qualities and the other, my feminine qualities. I won’t let you touch them but I will let you guess which represents which. Hint: the womb-like cavern of a truck bed enclosed by a camper shell is more gyno-symbolic than you might think.

I am a former competitive bodybuilder. I was twice a finalist for Ms. Olympia in the ‘90s. I’m no longer in the shape of my peak but I stay fit.

That means lots of long walks with my beloved pooch, Sappho. Lots.

Often on these walks with Sappho, I encounter homeless men and the recently-jailed.

Make no mistake, I am a strong woman and can handle my own. No need to carry a gun—besides, far too phallic.

I admire other strong feminists. For example, in my bathroom I have a framed photo of Andrea Dworkin, in my bedroom a poster of Valerie Solanas.

As a dues-paying member of C.L.I.T. (the Communist Lesbian’s Insurrectionist Trajectory), I consider myself a radical independent post-anarcho/guerilla-communist lesbian feminist with TERFy tendencies… allow me to explain. The fact that I am radical is evident by my extreme views and praxis. The fact that I am independent means I answer to no partner, no tribe, no master, no god, certainly no man—my membership of C.L.I.T. notwithstanding. The fact that I am post-anarcho means I no longer subscribe to the possibility of returning to an anarchist’s utopia—to that long lost amazonian paradise, that Themyscira in the sky, that Lesbos Isle of yore. The fact that I am a guerilla-communist means that although I work a meaningless government job at the Chamber of Commerce, I am slowly and imperceptibly undermining the capitalist system from the inside and directing it toward a sustainable communist future. The fact that I am a lesbian is self-evident. The fact that I am a feminist is self-evident. The fact that I will often unrecognize transwomen as real women because I don’t like the idea of an ex-man infiltrating our sisterly space reveals my TERFy tendencies. Full disclosure: on particularly lushed-up nights, I’ve flirted with white nationalist feminism as well. Shhh… this might be one of those nights.

I am also very active on the HOA board of my condominium community. I have thrice been voted as HOA president, that’s one more win than my Ms. Olympia titles.

You might even consider me the matriarch of the neighborhood. Not because I am matronly or nurturing or agreeable—far from it. Long ago have I dispensed with such useless feminine pleasantries. Long ago have I disengaged with the cultural trappings of conformist womanhood.
Long ago have I buried my make-up and my moisturizer and my high heels deep into the earth from whence they came. Nor do I cut a matronly figure, although I and many others agree that I am a very aesthetically pleasing woman. Of course, standards of beauty hold no interest to me.
Rather, I proclaim myself the neighborhood matriarch by virtue of being the most alpha of all the neighbors—male, female, and the unfortunate otherwise. I am tough, demanding, and perhaps you may even say unpleasant, but I am fair. And you can rest assured that they fear me—these weak, pathetic pieces of unneighborly shit who secretly thirst for my disciplinary fist to dominate their submissive assholes. These ugly humans and their unruly urge to procreate and produce more porcine philistines—so unlike the canine who is both graceful and loyal, and generous with the lapping wet tongue.

But woman cannot live on dog slobber alone and on lonely evenings I might enlist the services of my neighbor, a fat sadsack of a man who drinks too much and generally leaves me wanting—the repulsive pig. When I roll off his bloated body, while he wriggles in his filth and struggles to breathe, I consider how easy it would be to kill him with the knife that’s hidden in the pocket of my pants, bunched on the floor. I imagine the recently sharpened blade sinking into his wide belly and opening him up as he has opened me. Tit for tat.

On exceptionally saucy nights, perhaps like this one, when the Litha summer solstice moon is waxing full, and the toxic masculinity of Mars is in retrograde, and my moon goddess mother is divining fertile soil into my loins, and my blood is boiling over with feral poison and witchcraft,
I am given to taking Sappho for extensive walks to the RV/homeless encampment, not far from the local jailhouse. It’s there I am able to find a disposable, transient male lover who will fuck me into the hellfire oblivion for which I burn. Sappho acts as my sentry and my protector during
these obscene acts, watching while they occur in the bushes behind the RVs or deep in the dry creek bed. It is with these revolting cocks that I am able to relieve the flaming pangs of sexual urge—the burden of desire, that profane chemical which compels the temptation to perpetuate my odious species. The more foul and monstrous the prick—the better and the wetter. And the more disease-ridden and scaly—the harder I cum. Then for a few quiet weeks the hideously base animal living inside me is sated.

I must profess that during these sweaty Litha seasons of robust strawberry moons, when my lunar goddess is rising me from my silent sheets and driving me and precious Sappho to the transient enclave, and my juices are soaking through my panties that are as mischievously diaphanous as cheesecloth, and I am feeling so voracious that my cunt could rip a sadsack’s smegma-swamped salami straight from his carbuncled body—then and only then have I located that unique intersectional moment of pure bliss in which all at once I am reborn a tiny girl-child again while communing the outrage of the raped, the defiled, and the violated whose trauma I wish to possess as my own, while simultaneously submitting to the reckless abandon of whoredom that, admittedly, has always held remote and peculiar magick to me, like the distant pale face of my moony mother who glimmers on high for me and me alone, as I am spreadeagled
on my back, ravaged by the beast, and left writhing in the naked night’s nimbus.

And if you’re reading this confession, then I can only assume that my sturdier sisters of C.L.I.T. have successfully overthrown the phallocentric capitalist patriarchy and that I have fallen in the course of the revolution, which I assure you, I was more than happy to do.

by Randall Leong

Randall Leong is a wannabe writer and sometimes musician from Santa Barbara, CA whose work has appeared in Expat and Misery Tourism. Music can be found at serpentseason.bandcamp.com. Instagram/Twitter: @serpentseason