Afterwarmth
Sunlight staring coolly from the windowsill. Electric hush.
White pulsing disco bass skipping from the street, the souped
up radio. Escape across a wakenight. O swooping garrulous lightning
lines, O ice and melt and rising tide, O lavender flakes skyscraped
against the sunset—what were all those goddreams for?
My boyfriend and I argue our pegs around a cribbage board.
We change the rules, we drink more wine. Every win becomes
another hand. Meanwhile. A trillion twinkling LEDs; winking inkless
telephone screens. Your desire bright inside mine, still warm, stillwarm.
Winter’s sneeze ices down the street and no one on this Earth remains
except for their remains. Forgive the body its remains, forgive us our
machinemelted brains, forgive us now our daily bread, our daily Land
-O-Lord, and the moonfall, the dawnlust, the bulletborn,
the serpentsong, the everywar’s fluorescent hum. Hum of what? Remains
of what? bonetender, musictouch, cloudlight, letters, allspice, clutch.
What was it all for, the badyear’s rotwarm sunlight?
***
We Are Going Nowhere Together
After Lee Trumpfheller
A starchild made me supernova with a cocksleeve
shaped like a xenomorph. I imagined a thousand climaxes
chestbursting my body into starwink and tiddlylight.
When I say somersault, I imagine the sun twirly-whirling
giggledy-piggledy around the sodium sky. Everyone I’ve ever loved
has smelled the pit of my stink. I waft up daffodil.
A pansy pagan. The most flowerful nation on Earth.
I used to chart the places men touched me, my body
constellating to a starmap of lack. I was born
in a spacesuit. I look so ultraviole(n)t sunstroking my spitsword
in an oxygen mask. Maybe all desire is small oblivion. Maybe
We are extra-vagrant astronaughties umbilical corded to a spaceship
always plummeting, our bodies singed by gravity towards a planet
we’ll never touch. Say love and it won’t save us. Say revolution
and it won’t come. Say I reject the heteroconformist ultra-imperial
countryhood of “species” and we are all unreproducible aliens
trying to colonize each others’ warm tender-dark soft.
The night’s velvet black is vertigo and we are dizzy dancing the galaxy.
Seek out my constellation-corpse. Touch me here and here and
here and here and here and here and find your way back
to yourself. I once believed queerness was a house, joy
the journey home. How wonderful to keep discovering it
is the other way around.
***
Grindr Profile Selfie-Portrait
Silk smatters and spit-sheen spandex, or latex
latent with bulging seams, the body polytechnic.
Posed, poised, poisoned by possibility, he pulls
his skin taut at the nexus of waist and warmth.
The dark side of his chest glows waxed and gibbous—
but too small for satellites, just lit by luminescence,
phosphorescence of some rogue-planet hope.
Call it vulnerable. Call it exposed. Call it anything but real,
though there’s narrative if you make a few assumptions:
that there’s blood somewhere. And stink. And porcelain.
The trash can green with blooms of tissue—that’s intentional.
That reek of earth and salt and spit—glad you smelled it, too.
A story line thin and swaying, but you can hang your clothes
right there, beautiful, come over, handsome, you’d look spectacular
juxtaposed to the boy in the photo. He’s forsaken his belief
in better outcomes, now he’s stripped of all design,
all dignity—which means you can take him
raw or gloved, whatever it is that tugs you through the screen.
