2 Poems by Boston Gordon
BUTCH
The little body laid out on the ground
smashed face, ants, guts like
red worms squirming across the concrete
A bird — dead as a coal mine,
and a person soft as whipped cream
hunched over and crying
with a folding knife slid under
the hollow bird bones
to scoop the cadaver up
and put the animal to rest.
Never any rest here. A snowball
to the face, a quarry stone to the head.
Why the knife, why the haircut?
Why don’t you dress like your sister?
Dirty fingernails don’t make the boy
any more of a man.
THE REGION OF WANT
A summer spent staring into a graveyard
with boys who had feet smaller than mine
and couldn’t whistle worth a damn. Damn,
it was hot like falling asleep behind the field
and staring into the faded lines of aged headstones.
Just a toothpick behind my ear and grass stains on my ass.
Years from summers I dreamed of boyhood-
a whistle, there you are boy, leaning
against a headstone in the graveyard
of the city, hot along the water, hot
even though the nights are still a little shorter.
I’d grown shorter through the winter,
but somehow here was a bottle of rainwater
for a birthday I didn’t know about. Mostly,
I thought about your feet
which was all I could stand to look
at through the smoke.
I am half a spliff when you fall
at my feet and call me boy. It’s all on my fingertips –
you, freshwater, and splinters, you wild old rose.
If I am half a spliff, smoke me and listen:
Two boys stand on their shoe tips, thighs shaking.
Look, it’s the bad alleyway with the bathhouse.
Steam and men slink through the door cracks, hot.
But look here, back to the boys. This one
has eyes like gunfire and unchains a bike
from a parking meter with fine-tuned knuckles.
They depart, and the alleyway seems to split
like a pitted peach, or more grey and broken
like a knocked over headstone. Look up.
The other boy walks due north, nose in the air
like a beagle. Stops to roll a joint
in the trolley car cemetery where the old monsters
seem to hum in their rotting and are full
of vines of kudzu and urban ivy.
The death of a train car is slow. A match strike.
Both boys again. This one looks waterlogged
and stoned, with heavy tits. That one is breathy and
says, Come back. Take up my space. Everyone is leaving.
The other is howling, maybe.
Boston Gordon is a trans and queer poet living and working in Philadelphia, PA. They earned their MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. You can find their work published in Word Riot, Bedfellows, Guernica, and more.
