Queer: An Excerpt.

…

Let them be dead.

Let them be dead then.

For I have taken many deaths.

My face was drawn in the uterus with the pointed edge of a protractor. One line drawn down the center of my face, down and away from the widow’s peak, to the flattened bridge of my nostrils—the waters of my mother’s belly forced a slant upon the tip of my nose—down toward the lips and jawline. One cannot measure my head in one conjunctive assembly and find the skull, the mask of the skull to resemble that of a fleeting comet. My eyes bear the privacy and protection of men unlike me.

My mother died upon my birth and I have imagined her cliffed over the edge of a wooden gurney with a webbed thigh, her womb stretched out and bloody.

He, too, my father, he, too, is dead.

It was a gesture of protest—for he had wished to be cremated; but, I did not…cremate…him—once, he stood on the vein of an open road, waiting for me to return from my Bible practices, when he saw, at that exact moment, my pursed lips, the luring magnet of a lover, through the foliage of the trees.

He had been there after the boys had come.

…           

You see, they had come that afternoon.

I cannot tell you this without, first,…oh, there lives in my head one chorus, one voice and orb, at this very moment, it lives there…I must tell you, now, that there is only, that there is only love. For I loved him.

I loved Schevoski.

And he had as much to do with my being there, in that cave, as my father, as they did, and I cannot continue without first telling you about Schevoski.

It was an exchange; it was the episodic, auxiliary elation of an accident.

He had touched me, you see, he had touched me first—somewhere between the eyes—and he had done so privately.

I remember now the exact position of the paper elephant.

We had paused in our verses and had begun cutting things out for the Ark and an instrument, a tool, something linear and intimate, rolled out from under him, from under Schevoski, and he had gone to retrieve it there under the desk and we were there together, the others conversing, and he, he kissed me.

He lifted his finger and I can see, even now can I see it, its methodical banter, how it lingered in mid-air amidst the chaos of that new and private world we had never encountered and it landed in the center of my forehead.

Oh, the feeling of it, that new and private thing, sent an electrifying chill through my afore abstract predicament.

It was, it was the feeling of elation one feels when the radius of a star lulls in front of him; when a line is drawn in its center and magnified in his dreams. There is something there, an otherwise breached timidity; nothing, nothing there was breaking.

In that sanctimonious incline, that slope and we were there in it together, and I can see him now, Schevoski, vividly, the pulsating vein near his clavicle and oh, now, how it pulsates under his skin, glowing and pertinent, in its incubator.

He was broad-shouldered, his pale face coppered with a fingerprint.

His hair was yellow.

There it was between us, the paper elephant.

He took it inside his hands, and leaned into me.

He kissed me.

And I can see now, too, the manner in which he left me there, before whispering something promiscuous in my ear, and how I had come out of the world of intimacy to find him standing amidst the Others, shoving his eye through a hole in the paper elephant with the smirk of a Centaur.

Yes, yes, I whispered.

I would meet him there.

I promised him that.

I had opened a window upon the third moon.  My father slept and the cattle were roaming in the entrapment the world had caused. I lowered my head between the parallel beams of the barbwire and met him there, in the pasture, and we were naked and he kissed me and we held each other in our nudity, in the term of our whispering.

I would chase him, first, or him me, the oxygen elapsed and ticked inside of me quickly, whispered and panted inside of me, for we had kissed, we had kissed there on the blades of my father’s pasture.

The Brahma had begun to roam.

I can recall how he stretched his finger out, darted in and out of the wood, until the moon spilled out in front of him. I had been chasing him and I had done so with a bit of malice, a bit of warmth rising from my loins and something else not yet designed.

Yes, yes, I had chased him, his collared shadow upon the earth. A grunt would erupt from his diaphragm, the wind around us whispering something privately.

He would turn occasionally, Schevoski, a tuft of blonde bellowing out and wilting over his forehead. He would turn, whisper something, as I was the captor that particular evening, an unintelligible note stirred. What was it?

A lark?

How many times had I chased him? I do not recall.

But he liked it.

The running, the laughter, the looking over his shoulder, the note of the feathered bird rising under a fold in the Universe. This sound should not be foreign to you.

As I hear it now.

The green opened its arms and caught us. I stood over him. I remember this, oh, how I remember it, I would curtsy with error, as if I were drunk with wine, and step backwards, away from Schevoski and toward him again with my hand flattened out against the pale light and moon, lying there beside him.

I would insist he get naked, that he’d play along, the feathered bird, with its sonorous cackle and shrill, piercing a blade in the dark.

He would stand there, comparative to the chill of a porcelain femur, he was cold like that, and I never understood, even now, how he had become so anemic to the pleasures of the world, when he was so brutally stark.

He would stand there nude, pale, nude, and I would point at him from the green, so that I resembled a Drosophila. His head would tilt, as though, for a moment, the tune was pausing in his head. The bone of his hip in some complex position.

Perhaps, he appeared more vulnerable than he was.

What had he whispered over and over again?

Let me kiss you? Let me kiss you?

Why had he desired that? To be hunted down? Kissed?

I had lain there with him.

Both nude and silent.

I seemed a porcelain cup, a femurish prototype, one begetting the other in its origin, dangling from the rim of a child’s finger, spilling out onto the green. My oxygen fluttered, something was said of the heart and mind, and when I kissed him, my hand parted from my hip and pointed to the white edge of the moon.

We had lain there as two birds on a branch.

But there was no caw and shrill.

Only silence.

He had turned toward me, his hand pressed against the green.

He wanted to speak; but, he could not.

I wished that the fire would cease, that it would burn without us. But we clawed and stirred, turned and turned in it. The hooves drummed in this Chimera.

I had kissed him.

A murmur erupted, parted under the wing of the invisible Drosophila.

Perhaps, it was because we had heard it that neither of us could pretend it did not exist. It was the echo of a feathered animal, a bird perhaps, and…and…and as it was, I folded my wing over him and bit him.

Why’d you do that? he asked.

Again, I had kissed him.

I don’t know, I whispered. I don’t know.

And what’s further, I had told him, I had confessed that I had imagined stripping the wingbone of its feathers and killing him with it.

Why had I told him that?

He imagined—I knew him, I knew Schevoski—he had imagined the wingbone puncturing his spleen, the poison polarizing, his eyelids lowering and the wing, the wing with its blade and equator configured between us, a queer and a ghost, the elements of the two for what were we exactly? Dead?

I had not felt this internally, not really.

What it was was the temporary, malicious nature of boys, that institutionalized phenomenon of how one feeling turns into another prematurely and bursts in the brain.

A ruptured vessel leaking upon the imperceptible bridge of the heart.

We knew then, and the same, the same is true now, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That no one would accept this in Ellis County, Mississippi, where clouds loom and lurk in this sky and with this sky, this heart and moon—where the blood of slaughtered cattle lingers a lingering of the pitiful kind in the breathing of men who slaughter without regard to its looming—who on earth would have accepted Us?

Schevoski whispered something in my ear.

A blade reached my ribs when he said it.

What had he confessed? That he could go no further than this?….when the whisper reached my heart, I lay in the green with my back turned, my hip in the glow of the moon like the protruding tusk of a bursting seam; the powdered phantom of the vast incubator had reached me. I coughed.

Why had he made it seem that it was a love that only I wanted? I saw him now, standing under the blade of the moon; the circular rim of his penis jutting out; and each, each of us wept silently.

A shoulder was turned. A jaw lowered. We were here, the two of us, in this Universe with its puritanical laws; its religious greed, the kind that has perceived and brilliantly laid out, in its own mind, the template for the rest of those lives, those lovers who cannot help who they loved; why couldn’t they see that?

Each of us was digesting the turned shoulder; the lowered jaw; there it was, in this country that had borne us, this wide and gargantuan Universe, that even now, those lovers cannot weep without the injection of puritanical cruelty.

All that was left of our time together was the paper elephant.

He said it was a gift, that the paper elephant was a gift.

And all made by the hand of God resounded; the locusts; the dying shrill of a bird; the buzzing; and his breathing, he breathed with me there, and turned, his pale shoulder clothed and vanishing, as if it were a dream, as if the entire exchange were a dream.

The following afternoon was when it happened.

The blinding phase of the sun rotated overhead.

I was returning from my Bible studies and found myself alone on the open road that led to my father’s house. So much of what had taken place between us was in my heart and I had not bathed or slept and there was an isolation, full and pulsating, in my heart and I was sick with what I knew, I had discovered something from within, an exposure, a fading exposure that was once alive and feverish and was dying out.

I pursed my lips.

The cacophony of the world was quelled by the primal footsteps of the beasts—they had come that afternoon—entering and splitting further the radius and its star.

I had been thinking, my mind covered with the premature blooming of death, and someone yelled out, J.D. Foster, he yelled, and I turned to find Schevoski standing there, the cattle roaming behind him, and for a moment, I thought, I thought he had come to…to…apologize, to reinsert some sort of….he stepped backwards, away from the wind of the blows…the beasts had come and they kicked and kicked me and my head lifted a centimeter through the beam of the blinding sun and I saw him, Schevoski, standing on the outer rim of the melee, his mouth bridled, his eye showed between his index and thumb fingers; but he had not intervened—-I spat blood out of my jaw, and even this did not matter, they kept on, queer, they yelled, queer, and one of them laughed, my eye was closing and I saw him standing near the edge of the Others with Schevoski, pointing and resting his hands on his knee, laughing and laughing, Queer, he yelled, queer, and the others kicked and Schevoski turned and there was only the sound of  exhaustion, of the beasts growing tired, but even this did not stop them, any of them, so I yelled out, for someone, anyone, to save…me…and thus I heard the footsteps of my father, the paper elephant fluttering where it had come loose from the pages that were turning in the heat.

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