what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love 

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how 

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was, 

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart. 

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife 

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle 

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then 

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain 

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming 

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer. 

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished 

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor. 

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those 

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me.