"Cocksucker" by Jie Venus Cohen
Cocksucker
After Sylvia Plath
Old stories from southern American
landscapes tell the tale of men who chase the
tails of young farmer boys in their Sunday
best. These men work fervently from dusk ‘till dawn
vampiring the hairy dairy farmer
of his milky seed, seducing the cow-
sons and hen-pecked husbands. Chipping away
holy hegemony, alias: fag—
So as fables say, The Cocksucker moves
masked from normal man’s sight, cloaked in musky
oxblood leather, well-named, ill-famed, giving
escapism necessary for the
rural and repressed, star-spangled climate
of closeted hayseeds and their fathers.Audio: Jie Venus Cohen reads “Cocksucker”
Jie Venus Cohen is a mixed, intersex//trans writer and author of poetry chapbook VENUS LIMBS ('25, Thirty West Publishing). They are a 2026 Tin House Scholar, a 2025 LAMBDA Literary fellow, and have received support from Kenyon Review, Anaphora Arts, Mount Holyoke College, and others. Their work has been recognized in Seventh Wave, The Tulane Review, DIAGRAM, The Offing, The Minnesota Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan, Singapore Unbound, POETS.org, etc. They read poetry for Electric Literature and are a folio co-editor at ANMLY Lit.