haute couture, touch parade, codex of refusal, faux doughnut, authentic glaze, fat white, flat cat

hair, stick & poke baby, poetry is willing the infection out the page, a strain of silk like a virus up

the esophagus & into another’s mouth—

rust hanky, not the cowboy but his horse, femme gays, t-girls & t-boys, stone butch lesbians,

genderfuckers, anarcho-queers, those who have yet to be, those who wear poetry like a tear in the

brain,  those who wear poetry like a bullet behind the ear, a crown of laurels for the bar fly,

another champagne year because our mothers, all of them, are dying.

I am a handcrafted thing, an enjambment bending bones into Delphic shapes, plucked, the arms

akimbo, I march towards

the blushing dark, we both know that sweat smell, that faux glow, that real poem, we slip the

teardrop out its throat, holding hands holding our sex over & into—

here you & I reach through

the gash of stanza.