Faggot Poetics

Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy.
—James Baldwin

In any case, the story begins
with darkness. A classroom.

A broom closet. A bowl of bruised
light held over a city. Or, the story

begins with a child playing
the role of an ashy plum—

how it rises to meet the man's teeth
or doesn't. How the skin is broken

or breaks because the body just wants
what it wants: to be a hallway

where men hang their photos
on the wall. Does that make sense?

To want to own the image of the man
but not the man? To bask in that memory

of what first nailed you to the dark?