To Buy
Saccharine body baby,
snot on the inside of my t-shirt like
I’m made of it, I would show up
to their house wrung out by sadness
the earth speeding up through my feet
up through the
“Maybe your ears are broken,” my husband mused to me one night at dinner.
I was wearing headphones, eyes trained to study my plate, the sight of chewing as triggering as the audible noises.
They liked to brag. Who had the highest dose of anti-psychotic medication? Who had gone the furthest off the rails during a manic episode? And they loved to boast about their suicide attempts. Whose was the most gruesome?
When Tony died, I stopped recycling. The kind of power play that was both meaningful and meaningless.
I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.
The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.
The only reason I’ve seen Space Jam: A New Legacy so much recently is because I wanted to avoid talking to my wife.
Life is viciously short.
"Me, all scatter-shotted words I tried out in the air ..."
Spring was months away; I could pretend peril didn’t exist.
“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.
Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?
n the car, on the way to the hospital, I put my head in my lap and my hands over my ears, willing the city to disappear.
So obviously I couldn’t do it. She would have known it was real.
Years after reading the story (Junot Diaz' "Drown"), after teaching it to high schoolers (many of them POC), I set out to rewrite this queer of color narrative in my story, "The Monks." I wanted to show how a straight, masculine guy of color could brush up against queerness and feel empowered by it, not scared, even if in the slightest of ways, the slightest of spiritual progressions.
Marriage is often thought of as having little to do with eroticism.1
I met my husband while bartending in Oakland. He applied to be the new chef. Tattooed knuckles. Chubby cheeks. Full beard.
That summer held the moment, in real time and in my memory for several years, of something he said that I didn’t hear.
