GENDER

I watch him exit the field.
Two halves of a boy slung over the shoulder

Of his horse. The night burned like a blue asterisk
In the back of my throat.

His hands were stained green with birdsong.
His hands were brutalized with

All our undoing’s
Soft and bloody, like the shaved skin

Of a lyric none of us could remember.
And my youth was the length of a cage

In whose jaw I slowly erupted.
And this was why I lost myself to every red thing.

His kiss was hard and fast
And it hurt me to want it.

Once, as I lay in bed,
He took the star above me and carved her

Into a peach. I could hear her blood echoing
Even after she had fed us.

In the distance, I could hear the hard sobs
Of mothers with rifles clasped between their legs.

This is the story I tell myself when all else fails.
This is what I reach for when I am no longer young

inside his bruised hands
the sounds a doe makes

when she learns to stop breathing

By Ian Powell-Palm