^{—for Creativity and Crisis at the National Mall}

queer me
shift me
transgress me
tell my students i’m gay
tell chick fil a i’m queer
tell the new york times i’m straight
tell the mail man i’m a lesbian
tell american airlines
i don’t know what my gender is
like me
liking you
like summer blockbuster armrest dates
armrest cinematic love
elbow to forearm in the dark
humor me queerly
fill me with laughter
make me high with queer gas
decompress me from centuries of spanish inquisition
& self-righteous judgment
like the blood my blood
that has mixed w/ the colonizer
& the colonized
in the extinct & instinct to love
bust memories of water & heat
& hot & breath
beating skin on skin fluttering
bruise me into vapors
bleed me into air
fly me over sub-saharan africa & asia & antarctica
explode me from the closet of my fears
graffiti me out of doubt
bend me like bamboo
propose to me
divorce me
divide me into your spirit 2 spirit half spirit
& shadow me w/ fluttering tongues
& caresses beyond head
heart chakras
fist smashing djembes
between my hesitations
haiku me into 17 bursts of blossoms & cold saki
de-ethnicize me
de-clothe me
de-gender me in brassieres
& prosthetic genitalias
burn me on a brazier
wearing a brassiere
in bitch braggadocio soprano bass
magnificat me in vespers
of hallelujah & amen
libate me in halos
heal me in halls of femmy troubadors
announcing my hiv status
or your status
i am not afraid to love you
implant dialects as if they were lilacs
in my ear
medicate me with a lick & a like
i am not afraid to love you
so demand me
reclaim me
queerify me

Since hitting that deer outside your city, I’ve learned to measure
the distance between us
by counting roadkill. Engulfed tonight
in the perfume you left in my medicine cabinet,
I drive through sleep’s red edge
past twenty-two small lives splayed open on asphalt. I’m drawn
to your wrist by indolic jasmine, tobacco, and—trust a man
to bottle it—the first faint hints of cunt. The pressure
of your phallus against my thigh
elicits from my tuneless maw a song.

But our time together is mostly spent.

You watch medical lectures at double speed, taking notes
in your dissector.
I wash dishes.

Looking over your shoulder as a scalpel
separates embalmed skin from fascia and nerve,
it occurs to me: all we are is smeared out there on the road.

We discuss anesthesia.

Dispensing the drugs safely
requires an obsessive precision
we share. A lucrative career for you.
I could write without worry, you say,
knowing the cost of keeping a body,
how little might be left for language
after the daily labor of living
a little longer—as if either of us believe
in any such after, as if the last thing we share
is not this compulsion to study the corpses
of people we might have known,
to scoop out handfuls of white matter
so like our own bodies
as to leave each of us shaking
in a separate silence. We do this
because we share an ethic
of ending things gently—
if not without pain,
at least
with an exacting tenderness.

Boys do not kiss boys. They catch frogs.
Is what I told myself the second it happened.

& there we were, hidden in the hemlocks of a secret swamp.
Your lips drifting away from mine like a silent ship

leaving harbor. Gone, as quickly as it came. I watched the shame
leap into the pond of your face. O the ripples.

How good we were at turning moments into paper,
into things we could crumple up & throw away.

You grabbed the frog squirming in my palms
& headed to the “cave,” to the crack between the rocks,

where the black & white striped garter snake
slithered into shade. How I wish I could say

that I stopped you, that I didn’t watch unhinged jaws
spring out like lightning, wrap around that poor

& unsuspecting frog, but I did.
Still too young to believe it, I wanted to see it

gone, eaten, that green & slippery part of myself
buried in the belly of a beast.