Faggot Poetics

<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?