Selenelion
Morning above your mattress. Air conditioner hum. Noir shadows to the popcorn ceiling. The
dust bunnies farmed. Post-partem poppers besides the sheet. You wake me the morning after by
pretending to walk a moon craters, using two fingers and my bellybutton. You ask if a curtain
might help the atmosphere, but I’m distracted by your armpits tangled. The pockmarked cheeks.
The nose like Olympus Mons. The erupted yawn. Your shirt rises and your stomach peeks
through. I feel like I am escaping handcuffs,
and applauding the magician from the crowd. Back on topic. You are halfway into
a paper mache volcano in the corner. Imitation science fair. We have sleep
arguments about this the night before. Our first. Primary succession. Dust bunny
intermissions of course. I don’t remember the last time I watched the nightly
news. How could news have commercial breaks. The picture frame families
bought televisions to watch the moon landing. The future nuclear will gather
around the television screen to watch us faggots win the war.
We will be wet paint. The hookup mantra. My last image of you being your double knotted
sneaker on your left foot. Your fingers between the laces. The tightening. The loops flopping
onto the budding grass between the sidewalk cracks. I imagine the restraint.
Tu Jose, To Esteban, Too, Munoz
I have checked out your book on imagining queer utopia from
the best yet-realized utopia called the library, and have found traces
from the previous owners: quotes that had been underlined
or highlighted in blue or yellow or sections starred or scarred
by a half-hearted heart, the kind where the fingers fell asleep
halfway through the first arch, the heart itself some queer
imagining of what a heart should be: the absence of four
chambers and the pulpy mass of muscle placed into the
ribs by whatever god grants such life, (and I shouldn’t forget your
loaned, dog-eared book and sheared pages, the book like a sheep,
and I am telling you all of this because I want you to be proud
of me, of application, of the blocks between love and application).
J.B. Calf is currently stuck in the Alamo. Eats colby jack raw and twists his ankles in roller skates. He has worked with The Oakland Review as a Poetry Editor and has been previously published within Sonder Midwest, Chaotic Merge Magazine, and other publications. He can be found through Instagram at @enchilada89.
