Your Fetishes — Summary

if you spit on my face do it when you are walking past me

not when I am naked

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The speaker begins with a strange, almost bargaining concession: if you're going to spit on me, she says, at least do it a certain way. The request is small and oddly specific, and that's what makes it unsettling. She doesn't ask the other person to stop. She only asks that the contempt come while they're walking past, quick and impersonal, rather than when she is naked and exposed.

The title, "Your Fetishes," suggests the spitting belongs to the other person's desires, not hers. The poem seems to sit on the line between sexual game and real degradation, and the speaker appears to be drawing a boundary there. Being spat on in passing is an insult; being spat on while naked is something more intimate and harder to bear. The short lines and the isolated word "naked" at the end leave her feeling bare on the page, too.

The mood is cold, tense and quietly defiant. She sounds controlled, but the control is shadowed by hurt.

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