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Down the sideways face, through the dilapidated waterfall, we entered late afternoon’s house & a favorite room: the room of the butterfly skeleton. Intricate, delicate, somehow not an ounce of tragic. So beautiful we thought we could have perfect unswollen gums, be less predictable gay men, obsessed with our mothers.
They will think of him, so fondly, while sharing a bowl of strawberry ice cream, the last thing they remember him loving.
My boyfriend’s mother lives in a box. My boyfriend lives with his mother in slow, not quite stories during breakfast. I wish I wasn’t tired of his sadness. But I’d rather look at the snow, falling like silver confetti, another pretty thing my mind can make. I wonder if I’d be a better person if I learned to speak bird.
How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? I walk home calmly. I kiss him.
We’re both going to live to a hundred & then die peacefully in our sleep at the exact same time. I say, Yes, I say, Absolutely. I kiss him, Yes. At
the same time I think, But what about two hundred? Three?
or is it not space but distance? not happiness; relief? aren’t you forgetting how you used to sit, after school, at the kitchen table, & tell your mother every last thing from your day, the funny parts, the frustrating, the boys you liked to play Power Rangers with during recess, the boy you let play the Green Ranger, before you had to play Not Liking Boys No Not Like That, before you knew, before she knew, but didn’t she, already?
Waiting for one more gleam of you to push through. Drew,
You who all caps shouted GAY like YES whenever someone tried to lower case snicker, are you …?
Your emergency contact has experienced an emergency. The Texas sun shines hard on everything like a detective.
the beautiful back & forth we were. beautiful, to learn about her work, for her to learn about my loneliness. beauty of our lonelinesses talking. west texas beauty that some days hurt me into seeing how much i missed my seasons,
queer beauty, glory of the group’s questions, our conversation—enthusiasms fabulousing the room. & my handsomely beautiful pleasure-honor to say how queer, isn’t it, our living here. how queer, west texas, thanks to us. how unfinal, our unfurlings across the plains, our lines of pain, stanzas of standing up. & then, on the t-shirt table, one beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful shirt, its pinkly powerful shine—& the students saying, go on! all yours! & i sleep in it, now, back among the bursts of green, the long new england grays i know so well. i fall beautifully asleep in this shirt,
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She’s picking up two magnificently crispy scallion pancakes—their full magnificence held between her chopsticks, her skillfully nonchalant grip—& then she’s placing them on the boyfriend’s plate. She looks at me. Says, For him. Maybe she is asking about us by asking about the dog.
(I want to remember better. But I want more, more of the better to remember.)
Another list of five things I love, in very particular order: Cherry trees. Men’s musky armpits. Lies that are my backstory of how exactly Björk came to distrust poets, then used an e.e. cummings poem as lyrics for one of my favorite shorter songs of hers. The way I don’t care if heaven exists, so long as men’s musky armpits do. The smallest words, I tell my students, can make a world of difference. Conjunctions like “but,” “and,” “or.”Adverbs like “then.” How often “then” occurs in scenes like at the food truck—the lie the cook tells me, the truth he smiles at her, the reality that depends on
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After a list of your loves, I tell my student who’s feeling stuck, perhaps in every possible way, make a list of your questions. Like: What is love? Is it just saying I’ll eat a hundred bags of your hair? Or is it also talking, continuing to talk about the fact of his whiteness, my notness? How it is that I am an antonym for person, synonym for sickness? This one & a myriad before & mutations to come? Is posing all this as a set of questions when I already know the answers a form of lying? Sure. It’s May, I need this form of lying.
the queerlit, every bit of this aliveness I could find.
His barking like fistfuls of sunlight, like the sun set on fire. I sit up at once, understand what he can’t: the sunflowers, the jar, on the carpet.
syllable after syllable of your hand. /
She says not to send anything. How I want to send her all the sunflowers. Carol, you may assist me now. If you are indeed the holy rep of sunflowers, Carol—please make row after row flicker up in the night, in the worry-field of my mother’s head. Help her sleep. & dream only of glowing, petal-soft things.
You climb back in bed & touch my face. You climb back in bed to touch my face.
You wrap your arms around me & it’s like you’re the patron saint of touch as well as soft sunlight & soothed dogs. Or you must be the earthly representative of divine holding. Or you’re both & also a boy, like me, holding on.
should I, anyone, call it that, why
My mother smiles her best Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing a Little Better Smile.
Saying, suppose otherwise. Suppose a life so long & gorgeously silly, viewers will complain about everything left out from your biopic,
Never did I imagine your not, your never, your always capital N No unraveling. I’m still having trouble imagining you like this. Imagine that: me, beaming, leaping for this. A rain droplet of a thing, really. A real glimpse, gleam finally,
remember how I signed the letter explodingly yours, do you remember you were driving, we were halfway home, only eight minutes from Wegmans, remember when we measured distance in terms of Wegmans, like it was a lighthouse or pyramid or sacred tree, remember when your name
I’d prefer the type of eternity where we are inside, are us, & last night’s movie good, not great, a stray piece of popcorn still under our coffee table.
was a wind smooching another wind, who had very good teeth.
Remember L.A.? Spring & every tree sleepless. That night we read together
