79 Phonomania: A History of Noise
80 Gay Boys & the Bridges Who Love Them
bury it
WILL
the fisherman’s sneakers trouble the water
he baits his hooks with homophones, cartilage, pheromones
his hooks : telephones, specula, seraphim
he lowers his line into the dark
an adrenal needle plunged into the heart
feels something bite below the river
& pulls up boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
after boy,
BILDUNGSROMAN
i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible as a man. my biggest fear was the hair they said would snake from my chest, swamp trees breathing as i ran. i prayed for a different kind of puberty: skin transforming into floor boards muscles into cobwebs, growing pains sounding like an attic groaning under the weight of old photo albums. as a kid i knew that there was a car burning above water before this life, i woke here to find fire scorched my hair clean off until i shined like glass—my eyes, two acetylene headlamps. in my family we have a story for this: my brother holding me in his hairless arms. says
dad it will be a monster we should bury it.
ULTRASOUND
it’s not that we’re all born
genderless, though we are.
rather, once we were all small
women inside our mothers.
something about science
& sex organs & hormones
& god. no wonder she wept
red negligee when she walked in
on me at ten in her worst dress
spinning before her dead
father’s mirror, my eyes made up
into science fictions. felt me
again inside her, my pig thirst
threading her blood & body
mass into another veil i’d wear
& not care for. seeing mother
cry i found myself
into manlier fabrics. when i am
a boy again she tells me
it’s not that she hated me fey
rather, that day she swore
she saw the mirror sob. fetal lady,
little daughter, tiny apology.
NEW GOD OF AN ANTIQUE WAR
i only want the world
to end when i’m done
with it
a boy stares into the lake & falls
in love
it’s not how you think,
with his own reflection
but rather
the lake
o to be so fluid you can hold
another’s shape
& stay the same thing
this story is a horse
beaten into a new name
a french king builds a palace
of