<sup>Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy.

            —James Baldwin</sup>

In any case, the story begins

with darkness. A classroom. 

A broom closet. A bowl of bruised 

light held over a city. Or, the story 

begins with a child playing

the role of an ashy plum—

how it rises to meet the man's teeth

or doesn't. How the skin is broken 

or breaks because the body just wants

what it wants: to be a hallway 

where men hang their photos

on the wall. Does that make sense?

To want to own the image of the man

but not the man? To bask in that memory

of what first nailed you to the dark? 

Liz, I think her name was, the woman 
my mother brought me to. We played

cards in her perfumed office: lavender,
tulips, bowl of wax fruit. I was ten

and wanted to die. I don’t know why
I’m here again. I lived. Obviously, 

I lived. When I was older, but still 
a child, not innocent, but foolish,

I looked up from my solitary 
suffering. I learned the history

of men. I pointed to a spot
on the map they rendered. I said 

then, then, built my common life
in a room at the end. 

If it’s true, what they say, that poetry 
is written with the knowledge of

and against death, that it is 
a beacon, a bulwark, then Love, 

I confess, I have been no poet. 
Outside, a hawk circles overhead. 

Four cops circle a woman
dressed all in red. I circle

the apartment as you sleep, happily
in the next room. Just this once

I want so desperately 
to be proven wrong.