I wrote poems imagining my uncle’s and my mother’s childhood and their longing to escape—all as a way to create a history, however phantasmic, that would ground my own escape, my own desires for re-creation.

 

I imagined a past in rural Louisiana, the difficulty of growing up gay south of Lake Charles—both the bad in a poem like “Daddy” and the good, however covert, in “Physique Pictorial, 1955.”

 

Physique Pictorial, 1955

 

Glen was always the

first to fetch the

mail, stalking the post-

man through the

splintered glass of

his bedroom window.

He should’ve been out-

side his mother said, but

the mail-order catalogue

spoke with the voice

of the burning bush:

this is the flesh you

want, these are the

bodies you may

graft onto your skin.

Oddly, the paper was

brittle and the ink

ran when wet, but

here is a boy set a-

gainst a cheap sun,

his wrists in bracelets

of gold, little links

pinning him open for

inspection; at least,

we think it’s gold

but somehow it does-

n’t matter: desire can

spell burning in eith-

er black or white. And

look, mom, this is the

body I might have some-

day, but she doesn’t

hear what you do in

the bathroom anymore,

though part of her knows

that it’s only beginning:

you have received

the calling, burning

your fingers when you

hide the magazine

in the back of your

closet: nothing is so

heavy-handed as the

truth.