The Out-&-Proud Boy Passes the Baseball Boy
& we look at each other heterosexually, which isn’t
a real kind of looking, a looking everywhere
besides his face, my face, O look at the sky, look
at that nearly blooming magnolia, its heavy bulbs
needing one warm day to fully unbuckle,
floppy white petals finally draped with sun.
Even at the club, where it was easy
trying each other on—nervous fingers
sliding the spine’s slick chute all the way
down to sacrum, then lower—even there
he had to close his eyes, imagine me
different. I don’t blame him. I remember
that particular tint of shame, slipping it on
like a rest stop Trojan fumbled from a pocket
& opened with teeth. Later that night he took
my mouth to his starving places. Let me say that
less gay: I gave him a blowjob on a sinking
air mattress in the corner of a cramped Air
BnB with somebody’s foot flicking in sleep
three feet away. He didn’t kiss any part of
me, but it was good. It was. I’m trying to tell
the truth. Trying to believe my body can pass
his on this cracked sidewalk without
flinching into shadows because I’m nothing
like him. I’ve gnawed through every curtain
to belong in this light. This gorgeous April light.
Smut Psalm
for J & C
These days, a scandalous union
inside my jacket pocket:
a handmade rosary, lustrous
bits of cypress hollowed out
by a nun in a candled room
just outside Peoria, rubbing up
against a squat black flashdrive
glutted with grainy pornos
gathered by a friend in his year
of singleness, then passed to me,
in my own lonely season.
Mornings, walking past the empty
churches on Seminary street,
my pocket rattles like a gentle
snare, like sanctification
hard at work. I believe
things change when they touch,
even by accident—the rosary
regaining its flesh, fingers
before mine smoothing
each bead into an almost
perfect orb, a devotion
so precise it could only be
prayer; and the flashdrive
not so sad, a home
for the tired, for the strange
slappings two bodies make
when they’re mostly
inside each other, straining beyond
pretend, into something
ordinary—love, or light, or touching
a real tongue to a real tongue.
