Why Can't My Heaven Be A Mobile Home Park In A Carolina Where I Have Big Hair And Work Reception At My Husband's Tattoo Parlor?
- I've been reading a lot about Canadian men
- and chemical castration. When my lover pulls out
- my depression: he says "Russell, I'm certain the panic is over."
- He knows the river asks me for a breezeblock kiss,
- how the sad-eyed dragonflies in my body want
- a tornado spotting—oh, there
- there, there he is again waiting for me across the bar.
- If he loved me, he'd release an EP.
- He calls me a mixture of beauty
- queen hair and trailer park attitude.
- I leave my keys in the door. I would if I could turn
- the corner and end up in Spain. On the good days,
- he wants me on my baddest behavior.
- He picks my polish and then I blow
- each digit as if it's a double barrel.
- The older I get, the more ghosts I gather.
- It's 2017 and I need some simple happiness
- like a sundress with cavernous pockets
- and a fresh switchblade.
- My great gender trouble as a gay American
- cis male is that I should think erect
- not automatic rifle when I hear "semi."
- He asks about the men in my past, the archive of grief:
- the first-boyfriend-who-loved-you-but-not-in-public,
- the next who thinks of me then quickly stops himself,
- the one who marries late in life and if you squint you're the bride,
- the man I told my mother who touched me in the paper aisle of the Piggly.
- I tell him I have only learned that you can forgive,
- but you can't stick around—that we won't get out of county
- because we're bad and free.
- When I call him after a proper cry in the office supply closet,
- he asks what is drowning me today, as if memory is a growing leak,
- as if he could offer some Oprah level shit.
- Without a doubt, I say
- that in my family there was a klansman.
- That in that house, a white man killed
- a poc because of: terror, war, circumstance, 'cause
- they could get away with it
- and stay silent because I didn't ask.
- Something is eating me belt, watch, and all,
- I say to him, sweetheart, this claptrack's been waiting for you.
Death comes for the Good Ol' Boys
- in a gown of royal blue.
- She lines them up with relentless discretion,
- she lines them up by their pretty smiles.
- She says to her women: unhinge your jaws, bite
- the hand then devour the heart.
- The year of the new cannibal Amazon started with Cindy
- (from accounting) who, when over-pinched,
- started chomping on her boss' knuckles.
- Ten years later Sox stadium is the new Colosseum.
- The women place bets and eat fried men thighs.
- The fighters fight because men are good
- for only two things in this world: breeding and eating.
- Here—everyone's a little gay by necessity.
- Ke$ha rules all and The Man Cages reek
- of what men do to one another.
- Not even the last computer can recite the sound
- of a male perceived pronoun.
- In this apocalypse, we raise our boys until we can break them
- then bone-feed our front yards.
The Glove
- On fields of brickdust,
- beside the trailer park,
- he winds up and he winds up
- knocking me down
- to my knees with a skeetering
- groundball. Popcorn has started
- birdchirping and the concession stand lady's
- pepperoni hair mats to her pimpled head.
- He lifts his leg like a slow-mo hurdle,
- his elbow juts out like a warship cannon—
- he is throwing everything
- at me: the Cleveland suburb,
- the how-I-met-your-Mother-night,
- all the minor league meals
- living off library coupons in Ogden.
- I have saved his cellophaned collection of cards
- and the rubberbanded bound glove.
- When, if, he calls, I can tell
- the extra gray around his mouth
- sings through the hip pain,
- the hereditary hypochondria.
- When his father died in June,
- I stilled myself on a Chicago platform.
- I raised my lonely leg and my sad little arm,
- I swung until the world spun again.
