THE  27Th  EDITIOn

Start with our spreading

our fatty parts never

change—deep fried 

 

like calamari, our frying

 

pan our bed of gold sheets and thinning veils

 

you are not the last tendon meal 

I’ll gorge, in my primordial pouch, 

 

cat eye you like a beast set loose 

on every feeling I’ve been told crass

unbecoming of manhood. 

 

But real men taste

taste the whole—tongue along wheel spokes

leather belts, 

cogs of revolutionary engines

 

to spin the meaning of a new masculinity

 

run both cycles 

and turn our wheels         outwards

there is no love without consent

 

to expose—tear open—our

  selves.

 

Continue the spread, your hands grip

your muscles and fats pickled in vulnerability

 

my brine. 

 

I’ll caress them to mincemeat, cut

them to delicacy and taste—I expose 

 

to you the parts of me for which we are ridiculed

called faggots and dykes because we don’t

homogenize to generativity. 

 

His masculinity is an empty bottle, the woman

who served it—he is missionary and bears

his temple of missionary sex and dogged

repression. Start, end with his closure—teeth

thrusting in raw meat—soft underbellies

are for faggots and dykes. Kneading is for

breasts—above all other conservatisms is

a man with eggshell skin—tight sphincters

don’t accept split. His refinement in being

repressed, pressing buttons for cheap thrills

vending machine snacks—orgasms—assholes

nethermost to acting as though he could ever

be undone by the woman beneath him. Kept

orderly—carting bodies of his children to

future times where they’ll keep his legacy.

 

My yolk was exposed by high school boys 

who went to Sunday mass, 

played football, 

 

kept eyes up in locker rooms. 

 

Dropout by fifteen, I 

buried my tongue

 

nineteen, I buried my tongue 

 

in our gaping

selves in preparation 

 

for the redefinition of masculinity.

 

We’re universal

pleasures—equalizer because 

even monarchs shit themselves

 

we want the neglected, all

hidden and seldom shown anywhere

but a toilet bowl. The openings 

 

never reflected

in mirrors—we gape until we wake,

 

we’re only ever

as big as our holes—

 

love that tastes like skin.

 

Hold fast the spread

I love our cracks never mended—yolk spilling

 

through your membranes—I bury myself in you

and dig out again. 

 

These things cannot hurt me 

in utterance—our full course meal of undoing, 

 

my unbecoming amen, 

becoming a man.

 

I’ll suffocate

in here—there is only so much time

 

  to breathe—