Toothless by Dean Atta

He said he wasn’t the kind of Dom

who would expect his sub to remove all

their teeth just to be able to give him

a toothless blowjob. He said he wasn’t

into race play, per se, but he wouldn’t

rule it out if it was understood that

saying racist things during sex didn’t

make him a racist. He said he didn’t

challenge his stepfather’s racism

when visiting his mother in Australia

because he wouldn’t have been able

to afford a hotel for the rest of his visit

if asked to leave. He said he couldn’t

afford to buy a round of drinks at his

private members’ club in central London.

He said he didn’t have any family in the UK.

He said he didn’t have the capacity

to comfort me when my grandfather died.

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Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British author and poet from London with Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage. Dean’s debut poetry collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger (The Westbourne Press, 2013), was on the shortlist for the Polari First Book Prize. His debut young-adult novel in verse, The Black Flamingo (Hodder Children’s Books, 2019), won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award.