of them hoping to enter me — to enter anyone —
the way they thought I entered them,
and the way I entered them was wishing
I was somewhere else, or wishing I was
the someone else who’d come along
to enter me, which was the same thing. Love
in battle conditions requires a broad
taxonomy, queerness has its ever-more-visible degrees.
Josh, I know you know what I’m talking about,
you have the build of a stevedore. Which reminds me,
as a child in Nanjing,
I sculled the junks for my bread and I slept
in a hovel along the Chiang Jiang River.
I bred mice in a cage there who built their nests
from the frayed rope I’d taken from the decks, and one spring,
when the babies did not emerge, I lifted
up the rock that hid them, and I found
they’d grown together, fused with each other
and the tendrils of the nest. I held them up, eleven blind tomatoes
wriggling on a blackened vine. And now you come to me
in this Chinese restaurant in Malibu,
asking if you can help me. Please tell Circus Magazine I love them
truly, and please pass Pamela this message:
If you get back to Malibu by springtime, drop by the houseboat,
and I’ll rock your ass as far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Where the I Comes From
Our days often ended and began
with the sound of voices raised
in song. Even after we murdered
our friends and neighbors. Even
after we brought the attention
of our knives to the neighbors of
our neighbors, until at last
the neighborhoods fell silent
and the cities quiet and the city’s
city, the country then and next
the country, until finally the moon,
as if its own reflection, looked
upon an Earth that we had emptied
nearly back to Eden. Even then,
in that silence that seemed almost
a silence, sadly we were not
alone. All we ever wanted was
to be alone, to visit no one, to be
visited by nothing. But even after
we’d traveled to the nearby planets
and relieved them of their voices,
even after — and we all knew
this was coming — we fell amongst
each other, brother and sister,
until only I survived, still I heard it,
the universe subtracted of its skin
and hair, and yet the sound
of a voice, like someone singing
in the hold of a sinking ship,
unbidden and irrelevant, a fathom
and a fathom deep, but never fading.
If Not Princess, Then Warden
Things start off well: I’m the warden and no one’s writing on the walls in shit. I encourage all inmates to grow a mustache like mine, a bit of sculpted punctuation curling beneath the nose, directing the reader of the face downward to the lips. With them, and to the fellow in the mirror, I say, “my sweat unbreakable you,” helplessly using the word sweat instead of sweet, the way a high-school girlfriend did once in a letter, writing “Sweatheart, are we still going to the jamboree?” We were not going to the jamboree, anymore, Sally Garrett. This morning, out by the smokestacks before school, Lisa Shields pulled a bent cigarette out of the left cup of her bra before fishing for her father’s Zippo lighter amidst the rubble of an ancient civilization forgotten in the chaos of a giant orange purse. I peek into the purse, around the rotating axletree of Lisa’s searching arm, past the anthropologists dusting for fingerprints on a greasy tube of lipstick, and see a scene from the future reflected in a silver hand mirror: my English teacher, Mrs. Little, sitting on her desk while she explains how it wasn’t her intention to pigeonhole me as a poor student, except instead of the word pigeonhole, which I know she means to use, she keeps saying cornhole, not recognizing her mistake: “I never meant to cornhole you,” she says, again and again, “It was not my intention to cornhole you,” until I am dizzy, and when her black Mary Jane drops from her left foot to the classroom floor, where it will never move again unless someone picks it up and runs with it, I pick it up and run. For twenty years I have kept this shoe incarcerated, in solitary confinement, in the deepest level of the prison. These days, when I fear a riot — shivs like needlefish in toilet after toilet, the shrieks of the pigeonholed bursting from the prison library — I descend the steps to take my visitation with the shoe, but try as I might, I cannot make it fit my dick. And it’s always at this moment, that standing close to me, before school, Lisa glances down at the ill-fitting shoe, then lights her father’s Zippo with a pop that also seems to bring to life a chainsaw somewhere in the subdivision behind us. “It seems you’re not Cinderella, after all,” she will go on to say to me, in the shadow of the smokestacks. But until she does, I stand there, preparing myself to believe her, thinking of the jamboree, Sweetheart, and planning the cruel mustache of the future.
Pensées of the Sucker MC
See the shining city on the hill? Most of their laws
have to do with crops
and sorcerers. City attractive
as a first responder. City good at everything
like the she-male. When the owl
had a dollar bill inside of it,
when the plague had yet to make
its way to a theodicy, I stood on the steps
of the courthouse, saying truly
that sentiment is fear. Sexual partner,
sometimes your address
is your only remains. Sexual partner,
gone to the outlying vineyards
and the cellar invisible, gone
into the whistle and the metal
of the whistle. Meanwhile, my fellows, they tie
my eyes to a rough-hewn board. They payroll
my bones and rain their curses
down upon me, as if a rain of come.
Even those born before me
shall outlive me. Even those born after me
shall exceed my consequence.
On the hill, a city, and in the city, a house.
And someday you will all be sorry
when you recall how carefully
I closed each door behind me.
The Last Critique
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