C. Russell Price
Mr. Doomsday
Your blue jeans are ripped at the crotch
and tonight I’m getting that t-shirt wet.
You make me your handsomest pig as I puff
through your pit patch: your workday armor.
If you are wearing red underwear,
you will want to fuck me while looking at my sister.
You say with a straight-edge chagrin,
“You can ask only one question. Put on that wig.”
I save pleasantries and want only untamable baggage,
I kiss the Needle’s party gift,
I lick the Razor’s bracelet defeat.
I take you in me to plant a cherry bomb.
Tonight’s sex soundtrack is another pretty dead thing.
When the loop begins, it’s time to pay up,
shower, get gone. Returning, you smell like me
and I give you one on the house
because I know the sad boy scent.
You pull out with the breaking news.
Tom Brokaw still looks amazing.
The time to unmute the TV and stop jackhammering has arrived.
The latest great flood starts with an unstickable American faucet,
a whole Floridian town with its hands on its hips,
bubble gum smacking: each pop a “so this is it?”
With you limp beside me, I imagine: first the tub, then Tampa,
then the whole South is underwater. This John will rule
with an iron cock ring and super hero calves.
We will start with the Stars and Bars;
we burn the flag and name the dead.
Your family stops using the N-word,
your parents rainbow bumper sticker the whole state of VA.
This Wet Earth has no dry land for your bullshit.
The big mouths have been busted and the bullies’re buried.
My sex education consisted of touch → kiss → AIDS,
Brandon Blankenship: you were wrong and I don’t fucking forgive you.
My John and I fuck every day because we’re the last left in Chicago.
We pretend the market’s still standing and closing at 10.
No other world but this one now.
When my John is gone too long,
I think he’s found a third
breathing thing in our fish tank home.
I wonder if he pays them after, if he says my name
like a foreclosed amusement park.
If rather than questioning, he simply says “I’m sorry for bombing
those islands that you loved.”
C. Russell Price is a genderqueer poet originally from Virginia but lives in Chicago. Previous publications include: Assaracus, Court Green, Glitterwolf, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. They are a 2015 Lambda Fellow in Poetry. They currently work with TriQuarterly and Story Club Magazine. Their chapbook Tonight We Fuck The Trailer Park Out of Each Other is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016.