Rich Goodson
Smut
Dad’s face at the window
ensures I feed the mouth
of the bonfire with all of it:
all of Brad, Marcus, Lukas & Jeff
& all of my short life with them: months cutting halos
round the lines
of their glossy contortions.
Since my gallery’s reveal
I’ve been a dud.
A cissy.
Dad’s pupils have shrunk as small as fleas.
He will not say a word to me.
He will not look me in the soul.
& Mum is not to be told at all.
Under these striplight stars
I feed the fire.
I feed it my glossy conspirators,
oddly relieved to have their American bodies brought to light, in this English dark.
I know I, too, will be scissored from my story
fed to a fire
biohazard
because being cissy is human
immunodeficiency virus
is it not?
is abjection
is hyperchondria
is slipping off the tightrope wire somewhere between here & twenty-one
is it not?
*
Brad going down on Marcus
breaks out into aubergine lesions
the moment I put a match to it.
Marcus going down on Lukas
into green-edged fistulas.
Inflammations.
Lukas going down on Jeff
is where the dye’s ammonias twist
into peacock-blue sarcomas.
Jeff going down on Brad
is where opportunistic rashes of mauve
grab grab at the air.
*
Dad’s face has gone from the window.
He’s left me to it.
So I snatch one glossy page back
shake shake the fire off it.
I hold its edge as close as I dare to my eye.
Its inner edge a hissing lava, moving inward, crossing bedsheets.
Its outer edge frays, gently cremating into air.
& then I notice that Brad, Marcus, Lukas & Jeff have completely slipped off the page.
I squint into the dark around me & there they are
crawling on their stomachs
through the delphiniums
like Army Ken dolls
neither created nor destroyed
eyes swiveling to the left & to the right, escaping.
Rich Goodson is a poet from Nottingham, U.K. As a day job he teaches English language to refugee and migrant teenagers. He read English at Oxford and went on to do a doctorate in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He has two poems in the Penguin Poetry of Sex. He is Queer, Zen Buddhist, is growing a mighty beard—but no, he is not trying to be Allen Ginsberg.
This poem is not previously published.