I don’t know his name. He could be my father,
but is not my father
since he is white, and here,
and easily impressed
by the way I roll my neck.
This is not a dream. Don’t pinch me.
I won’t tell you how I survived the wreckage.
This story doesn’t leave the ocean floor.
This story went away, bleached
clean. In an earlier version
that man became a girl,
and then, years later, a creature.
Tentacles dripping with grease, glowing
white eyes.
Am I lying again? The opposite
of helpful is not helpful,
which a life raft would be. I don’t need to be saved.
The opposite of touch is bleeding. The ocean swallows
all the colors, and will never stop
trying to get inside my body.In the current
draft I tell: he becomes a man again,
and then a man shriveled
when met with salt.
TEACHER’S PET
I ride the bus the entire way
with the cold peaches sweating
in my upturned shirt. The fruit rolls
across the table and onto her office floor.
An apple, though a tougher breed,
would have been too cliché. I hand her the one
I believe to be the sweetest, the one opened
by the carpet’s rough skin. Peeling the sugared
meat from the ground like separating a wound
from a gauze bandage, I raise the borderless fruit
to her mouth, holding it above my head, a gift
already unwrapped. She buries her face into my
small palms and slurps the juice, the syrup
dripping into my hair. Her clean fist wipes
the gloss from her chin and a small boy
stuck to the back of her hand.
HALLOWEEN, 14
Of course it was a bad idea
sending my address
to that headless gentleman—
jack-o-lantern’s smile, out of frame,
assumed he would come on a dark horse,
not unlike a prince. I invited him over
while mother slept in the next room,
exhausted from hiding in our dark house
when the neighbor kids, who tonight,
covered themselves in blood
and pretended it was a costume, drummed
with laughter while they pissed
on our lightless porch—round here
we don’t pass out candy, round here
you ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar
and she hands you her newborn—
don’t you dare give it back. Don’t
you dare try to coddle it into silence.
You let it cry and cry until it grows
up and urinates on your mother’s
basil, until the whole goddamn street
glows and smells of burning bags
of shit, or at least that’s the smell
I remember when I think of that night,
think of darkness being watered
thin, think of that man, who sat
in his humming car for three hours
chain-smoking, headlights pointed
towards my bedroom window, calling
and calling, whispering some name I forgot
I’d given him, waiting for a bloodless boy
to come out from hiding.
II
“Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy,
or one with less heart than I have?”
— Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio
THE OCEAN, MAYBE
He didn’t expect me to be that fat,
didn’t anticipate the extra weight
he had to carry. But since I am
already here and warm enough
to cradle a pulse in a wilting man,
since the moon is waning (or waxing,
never could tell, really) on the other side
of the city, since the dogs snarling and barking
in the doorway have stopped and grown
accustomed to my scent, since the buses
will stop running soon, and the other men,
by now, will be too drunk to drive, or hold
an erection, since I’ve made an attempt
to look at least halfway decent, to be more
than pixels, since my body is a sea,
a good sea, the ocean, maybe,
since I’ve trained my mouth to suck
the bullets out of dead men,
I don’t have to learn his name,
since I am, after all, a grain of glass
on a waterline, cutting open
his eyes every time he blinks.
TEACHER’S PET
Know: I am somewhat grateful for this body, this ugly,
this slow metabolism, and these layers and layers.
I am not saying
I’d be beautiful thinner—I tried that already, got plenty of affection
from that woman with the smudged face and melting fingers,
those claw marks
that rise to the surface of all these stretched cells. I have built myself
a safer body, covered the rot with rot. Sometimes I can hear that little boy
I tucked away,
lost in this new house, gasping for breath, or another meal, or her,
the woman that held our name in her mouth like a Eucharist wafer,
or a wet god,
and maybe praying was enough, maybe the scars weren’t necessary
to ward off spirits from this secondhand husk. Something wicked
has occupied me
for years, wallpaper dressed in bitter smoke, a chandelier
of unbrushed teeth, a school of birds picked and pecked,
upturned the lawn,
until I woke up holding a pair of scissors and a fist
clenching the parts of me that had already died,
there’s no need
to eradicate this vessel of shadows. Lightning
won’t strike twice on a vandalized house.
IT WAS THE MORNING HE DISCOVERED CHICKEN BONES UNDER MY PILLOW, OR IT WAS THE NIGHT I DRANK, AND DRANK, AND DRANK UNTIL I FINALLY FOUND MY KEYS AT THE BOTTOM OF LAKE HARRIET
Bellyache humming a dull
sailor’s tune. Boy with sugar
in his tank. The organ,
the origin, life-sized and growing
legs, growing fever and a dry
sense of humor. Laughing
and clutching a gut, a headboard,
another boy’s genitals. Another god
to blame for a sleepless night.
A body filling with ghost stories,
gutted by mood lighting. A house
filling with a magician’s dirty laundry.
What privilege to smell sulfur
and assume candles?
The heat was supposed to break
a month ago—wait for it…nope.
Still hot, still thick and graceless,
smoke still in midair. Still here.
Two weeks facedown in the mud.
Drunk—at least I think we are.
Lovesick—I’m sure we’re not
the only ones starving. Some myth,
right? Some god, right? Take this body
and see a body, where so many see a grave.
Come! See: the ugliest mouth
on both sides of the Mississippi.
CHOKE
Perhaps my body would make more sense
if you cut it open. A door that swings
at the throat. Your lap stripping
the wet carpet of my mouth, prying loose
the marble tiles. Tell me if you know
an affordable magician with hands
steady enough to sever a torso and conj
ure,
from this heaving carcass, the rabbit’s bones.
If I say: your father taught me how to smile
a real man’s width, I would be lying, though
I’m almost certain he had a child. There is a boy
wailing in the distance, but that too could be me,
or my hunger, which rises with every person
it swallows. My cheeks swell
with sand, and I close my mouth,
and there’s no other exit, no way out,
just some man spreading his light
at the end of the tunnel.
TEACHER’S PET
When you remember her face
for the first time in ten years,
you are across the aisle from a man
who looks nothing like her,
but somehow you recall the night
she came to your house
and how she flinched
when your mother thanked her
for dropping off your backpack.
Think back to the way you felt
when she called other children
to her office, how relief was a house
painted green. Remember the way
she recoiled when you called her
mommy, or how she kissed
your forehead before you boarded
the bus, on your way back home.
DRY
When I warned my mother
about the mold starting to grow
along the bathroom tiles,
she simply put a rug over it.
She ignored it for months.
Engulfed by a storm
cloud, the pink shag began
to transform. Soon lost in the skin
of a wild animal, the tiles became
the gray scales of a dragon,
but my mother kept on ignoring
the smoke, the bullet holes
in the toilet tank, the masked man
behind the shower curtain.
Have you heard of the boys
who turn wolf in moonlight?
Or the women who turn mother
at the foot of a hospital bed?
Such careless children
to let the piercing get infected
to the point of amputation.
To cover the scab with a fucking rug.
When the men came in white
to gut our porcelain wound, she blamed me
for it all, the leather-coated ceramic, the bill,
the spores reupholstering my lungs with wool.
NOURISH
I see the boy gleaming underneath the neighbor’s
motion detectors, face cut
with the clothesline’s shadow, like his mouth
is frothing with tar,
or blueberries, or maybe that’s what hunger looks like,
like a forty-minute drive,
like gas money, and I want to ask him how much he spent
to get here, so I can offer half, or at least
know how much I am worth, so later, when he’s pulling out
my spine with whatever instrument
makes the least amount of noise, I can gauge the right amount
of soap and boil, or maybe just lay
in its filth, like that dinner table with the plates rusting over,
how I promised to clear it last week,
but just fell asleep on the couch with my pants unbuttoned.
THE DOCK
No one wants to go near the lake
that swallowed two more boys
this year. Sad story, yes, but we’re thankful
to have a pretty place to be discreet.
Not saying a basement can’t be pretty,
and don’t get me wrong, I am a fan
of the mass-produced hotel art,
the same photo hanging above each bed
makes it easier to pretend each new room
is still our room, makes me crave a life
of dull decor and basic cable, makes my mouth
water, really. I bite the lips off of a Styrofoam cup
and spit them at the ducks that swim past.
Wait. Don’t eat that. Fuck.
This is the first time I hear him laugh out loud.
With him, there are few noises I can recognize.
A fly lands on his cheek and I try to brush it
away, but before my hand can cast
a shadow on the bridge of his nose,
the fly burrows into him. He doesn’t flinch,
just winks—and now there’s one on his knee,
and another lands in his dimple, one on each
eyelid. There are hundreds now, all digging
or moving underneath his skin, all bubbling
behind that firm smile. His eyes begin
to vibrate, and he doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t
need me here, really. I am no expert, or exorcist,
or great love. I am just another boy sitting
an arm’s length away from someone he doesn’t recognize
in the light. He opens his mouth and they all fly out,
not a swarm, but a single-file line, a thin braid of black
hair, the longest exhale from a sinking car—that’s it.
There. That’s the noise I’m so familiar with.
DEAR FRIEND
for JD
It’s another winter
I’ve refuse to wear mittens,
and still my hands are here—
tell me again of the cold
that far north of daylight,
or sing me a song
I will never make the effort
to understand.
Do you tell the story of us?
The boy you found digging
a hole in a whale’s back,
or is it the clean version
where you drive across the country
just to be disappointed
by the ocean, or you drive
across the country just to think
about calling? If the tale starts
in winter, then you are already gone.
I tell you I am happy,
and you tell me you are happy,
and I am told I’m supposed to
hate you, since hate is the body
that stays when love leaves,
but by now that skin has a new name,
and if the story of us begins
in summer, then I’m the one who left.
I’m the one who buried everything
that had a face.
THE GAY 90S, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, 18+
after Sierra DeMulder
This is where the straight people go
to watch The Gays. They come
wearing pride and proud in fishnet
costumes. They come to watch the main event
of smoke and sweat and mirrors.
We are your #1 fans! They have all come
to The Show: See the Cock Swallower.
The Dancing Bears. Come watch those Strong
Women. The Married Men
all cramming into one bathroom stall.
Bring a beard and a moist towelette.
It’s a five-dollar cover. It’s a good time. Tip
the bartender,
smile for the cameras, twirl for the fire.
The audience is watching. They are waiting
for you to do a trick.
AT THE SUPERMARKET
I find my mother’s shopping cart in the middle of the aisle with her nowhere in sight, purse still in the cart, eggs crushed underneath soup cans. She is not in this aisle or the next or the one with the deodorant. When I hear a pyramid of jars collapse, I look for her clumsy hands. I am disappointed to find a small child standing in a pool of green juice. Ugh. Where are your parents, kid? A scream from the checkout lane, a stampede of grapefruits, all belonging to someone else. My voice, a hot stone curdling the dairy, the creamer, that lady’s breast. A kind strang
er helps me call for her. He doesn’t know he is saying the Vietnamese word for mother. He assumes that he is saying a child’s name. This makes her more important. This makes her hunger a room filling with sand, her world darker, slicked with ice and sharp edges. The bathrooms are a hopeless and empty playground. The parking lot, a scatter of mothers with bumper sticker faces. The children, packed meat, all squeaking their cellophane song. This way to the sugar. This way to the dairy. Aisle four aisle five six seven bakery meat deli. And of course just like that, just like traffic, or magic, or winter, she is there, cradling a watermelon like a ball that rolled and just kept on rolling, until it stopped at the lips of a cave or a strange man or a semi truck. She drops the watermelon into the cart, on top of the tomatoes.
CHRISTMAS EVE, 17
The only goodnight kiss I would
receive came from the bright burst
of headlights as he backed out
of the hotel parking lot. Each raw
knee, puffy with the negative imprints
of the carpet’s braided teeth. Only the sink
has hot water. No point in showering
when sweat is no longer sweat. You can
no longer see his pulse’s splatter across
the palette. The paint is a different color
when it dries. It’s like he was never here.
The gift was rewrapped. A garland
of meat, unstrung. The glass is full.
Again. Again. The mouth, a clean
gutter. The body, a buffed wall.
This never happened. The botched
deconstruction, tooth by tooth,
each growing back. Smile
digging its way out of a pink grave.
Everything is fine. Nothing is gone.
DIFFUSE
Their arms reaching overme, like a bridge,
or a tightrope over some electric pool. Finger-diving
into each other’s backs.I am still
fully dressed, and maybe I’m a prude,
or maybe I thought
some eager mouth would find me.
I guess
that’s what I get for thinking of myself half-full,
or even water at all, or even cold. Y’know
you’re not supposed to
be cold. Not with this many people
in a bed. When they finally notice me
kissing their shoulders,
like a dog eating
off the dinner table, they both kiss me.
This Way to the Sugar Page 2