POETICS: taking things with me through stone and lull
By Brody Wood
how I am nothing but I am through and through
leap I am nothing but space
ways to slatternly have boyhood
I can’t be humble when I miss my dead godfather
like this his poem is too smart for me I think I should love him
best trimming his beard nothing literary about that
my lover brings me to the doll circus in the stove museum
so I ruse-cry lying on the floor until it’s turned off
then I am earnest and I cry and cry with my
dream-godfather at the amusement park where
I remember him transparently I close his arms around me
and give myself the tour my lover and a man
who demonstrates all the saws and he sings with the player
pianos I hope to god he is somebody’s grandfather and
how I want one too moves like a formlessness
where my grief takes up space strongly in a plastic bag on
the counter with a dead mouse in it that the cat brought
home and in the bathtub with the sound of grass dying
nothing besides this is guiltless reason
wish I shared blood or my first 9 years with more good men
my brother once standing up in the kitchen inside of
himself being shown to me with a small cut near
his elbow I licked it like a retreating pet
and learned about coming down with something
that stays there hollowly through playing cops and robbers
with our knees on the carpet and my similarly
heavenly close boy one who I know as an adult
who ties his underwear on my head and pulls me up
and down the stairs like a kid I love one who is
a brother one year at a time and is ready
to be father to my babies at other times
for me I was with him where I learned about the things
he is afraid of coming down with and staying there with
my lover puts my fingers in her good mouth for this
ways to condescend
who I am when I carry a litany of crimes
like a birthday cake for my closeness with a strongarming
boy the two of us drowsy surgeons his mother’s
house in Auburn out-limbers me
is more limber than what happened inside of it
how I feel hamfisted under my wet hate
the beginning middle and end of some of that
condescends and is pale is more limber
than a whole young organ pale guilt
washing my hands of a boyhood who comes around
to wash me humility of a sweet onion
where I was afraid of your boyhood
where I didn’t know if it was attached to you by
the inside strings or outside
“there are new words
for all of this” his mother’s house in Auburn
when I was finally out of high school
my boyhood is a fair pedagogy now
though he scholars only in bed under my tshirts
ways to be gullible
go where a mess already is come at myself
with a home of unresolved places the first morning that
is every morning the thick spring months
and everything is hard a morning is a neck with it’s
betraying limbs stretched until they are off
the thing that lets me stay alone how I feel a hard puddle
before I even wake up where a map is a thing like a neck
alone when the things that usually know how
to reach out plainly let me down
and above a neck where I start whining because of theory
above all the research of sadness where
a map is a curriculum of blessings leap I feel like
a hemisphere of camp harm I feel like nothing but gullible
by cosmic rudeness but my lover would fall back asleep
and sleep in with me on that kind of morning
what reconciles me and who I remember like a bat
my high school sweetheart the time for fists
boy was never not leaving me but it had nothing
to do with me the boy I am when his name keeps showing up
on maps in my girlfriend’s truck a township in eastern
Penobscot county/the Ford Taurus boy’s high school
in my heart near Belgrade/Dyer Lane in Belgrade
on the way home from the vet with Emily/
short road in a ski town/a fort town right before Canada/
a wet corner of the page and of the land
what dries me is the first time I was mad at an apartment
in Arizona a girl with paws in June made him
sleep in the hottest room because I was incomparable
an earlier flight home and he loved me right
through it I can love him through a torn v-neck
on his mother’s front steps for 5 years his license plate
on every car to me a desert guilt laden at the bottom of
his mouth again each winter I am sucking
the desert and what I want with the agelessness of it
and how it doesn’t forget us even by
the time I graduate high school my lover tar bruises
my bicep with this and starts looking for apartments
in Santa Fe with me the apartments of those
months will fold me alone they fold me alone here
in Kennebec county of course too
my lover says “you have a train here” Emily she is
a train here too her procession of storms shrinks the floor
casually and the wet mattress falls and
neither understood plump body rolls off because I know
where I stand and I know where I sleep well
About the Author
Wild Gender is an online magazine and creative hub born out of gratitude for the gift of full expression. We are dedicated to creative practices that celebrate gender fluidity, identity and expression. Wild Gender prioritizes visual art, creative writing, and journalistic work by trans/gender-variant individuals who have never before been published in a public venue. Run entirely by volunteers,we are always in search of writers, thinkers, and creators hoping to participate in our growing community.
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http://www.drjasonmihalko.com Jason Evan Mihalko, Psy.D.
