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SCREENING

The paper gown pulled open, nearly off
my shoulders, the dermatologist passes
his penlight over new spots. Silence balloons
between us, filled by the fluorescent hum
above and his mouth breathing near mine.
I try to recall the last time I was this close
to a man. “Cherry Angioma,” he exhales
onto my chest. “Blood vessels in the skin.
Perfectly normal.” I am left alone to dress,
the paper gown on the exam table still
holding my body in its folds. I examine
my skin's failure to contain what I am
made of. Blister-red, they puncture this pale
scrim the way daylight surrenders to stars.

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TORSION

Failure to meet
the two-inch Sit and Reach standards,
failure to reach
even the wooden edge
of the Presidential Fitness box,
hands out and head bowed,
a disciple of
some athletic god.
Except I was the last sixth grader
seated on the gym floor,
spine stuck, s-shaped,
that sent me straight
to the orthopedic doctor.
After aligning
hips and knees,
forcing both feet to fold forward
in his hands,
he showed my mother
the twisted tibia.
"Hereditary," he said,
pointing to her posture,
her own foot turned
away from the body.
He scrawled a prescription
mandating
two minutes
of daily stretches,
for both of us.
That was the same time
as the therapy,
the endless sessions
spent straightening
out the same
sex attraction.
That time was full of failure,
except for the two minutes seated
together, our legs parallel, pressed
to the floor, finding
the same threshold and
trying, trying
to reach beyond it.

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BIRD LAWS

In a workshop, an instructor says it’s cliche
to put a bird in a poem just like that: bird.
Rather it must be earned, named. Say

a sparrow. Not just birds, but a band of jays,
a Vatican of cardinals. Participants record
this in their leather bound notebooks.

After a reading, my wife roasts the writers
for lazily dropping birds in poems, trope
she says. “You should have to actually

know a bird to write about it.” By know
she means encounter. Not only assisted
but confronted. Destroyed. I shouldn’t

confess this, but one spring I killed a cardinal.
Not just any cardinal, this bird was a blood-red
warrior, attacking its own image for hours.

The air rifle was a last resort. Before that,
weeks of reflective ribbon, taped newsprint,
fishing line strung up to catch the sunlight.

For $15,000 or six months in prison, I slid
open a screen, lined the sights up with where
the bird rested between bouts, then: bloodshot.

Reader, know I am not a bad person. Tomorrow,
at the top of a tall ladder, I will offer the clutch
of my hand to a black-chinned hummingbird.

Exhausted from beating the screens, it will let
itself limp in my grip. Then still and unafraid,
from my open palm, it will splinter free.

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✧ Winner of the 2022 Gearhart Poetry Contest ✧
Selected by Benjamin Garcia

CLOSED CIRCUIT

After Félix González-Torres’ “untitled (perfect lovers)”

My therapist draws in blue pen two circles
on a lined notepad. I twist my wedding band
with the fingers of my other hand. The two
lines intersect to make three shapes. Sitting
across from her, the third shape looks like an
open eye. “In this diagram, there is too much
overlap to be considered a healthy relationship.”
She draws a second set of circles, their concave
shapes connect only at a shared edge, as if
each is facing away. “Healthy relationships
consist of two distinct individuals.” Her wall
clock frowns, hollow-faced, hands apart.
From my position, the second diagram looks
like the symbol for infinity. The clock snaps.
I wonder if she sees symmetry the way I do:
a camera lens spins at each end until a subject
is pulled into focus; a total eclipse requires
two celestial bodies and begins with a stage
called First Contact; it’s common for two
women in love to put their whole hands inside
each other. I no longer measure my age from
my birth, but from the precise second we met.

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ENCOUNTER AT MUSÉE RODIN

It wasn’t until after we
toured the sculpture garden,
the maze of towering topiaries,
the top of the Eiffel beyond them—
after we circled The Thinker,
surveyed his bronze, muscular body
bound to a marble block—
past the Gates of Hell, the scenes
of the damned reaching like hands
into the sunlight, sirens sounding—
after my mother and I eyed nearly all
the burnished bodies, two full floors
of them, naked, named after Greek gods,
some headless, baring broken genitals—
when she caught me, lingering on
a single sculpture, the one poised
on a pedestal before an open
and arched window, torso turned upward
like a gymnast in a split jump,
hips cocked at the sockets, labia
displayed, an impossible posture—
when we read the title card together, Iris,
Messenger of the Gods (known also as Study of
a Woman with Legs Apart) that we both
knew what news she carried.

Palette Poetry

THE BARRETTE

She couldn't have known—
her fingers brushing my forehead,
pulling loose strands from my face
to fasten a plastic clasp, a butterfly,
pressed hard against my skull
until the loud snap sounded inside
her bedroom where she eyed our family
before church. "That's better," she'd say
to the mirror, palming my shoulders.
We'd stand as if for a family photo,
a mother with her eldest daughter,
the bright barrette biting my scalp.
No way she would have known
that these insects scavenge salt
from rancid animal skin and with rolled,
forked tongues, suck nectar from fat
flower heads, lick the acidic surfaces
of polluted pools, flit in the air until
landing on a lizard's eyelid to drink
its tears. Of course she didn't know—
not even the British book binder
who hand-stitched the first volume
of Butterflies and Moths understood
exactly how much nature affixes
elegance to deviance, like a pair
of wings folded in an open hinge.

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LIGHT IRIS

When visiting your mother and her wife
at their house, the last on a Maine road bound
to the edge of a cliff, a sandy expanse stretching
below wide-open gleaming glass windows,

we slept in the basement bedroom, under the pink
scalloped sheets and walls of framed female nudes,
your hand pressed over my mouth, my eyes moving
between the illustrated breasts and yours.

In the morning, as the ocean air licked the living
room furniture and dark, salt-stained curtains
floated freely over the kitchen table, my bare feet
smooth on the whitewashed and worn brick floor,

I snuck into their bedroom, a skylight illuminating
the quilted queen bed, high-posted and bloated
with sham pillows, where the open-faced white
flower of an O’Keeffe painting returned my gaze.

Moist Poetry Journal

✧ Winner of the 2022 Pigeon Pages Poetry Contest ✧
Selected by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

HOW TO GROW A PEACH TREE

When we finish digging the 3-foot by 3-foot hole
for the peach tree—a dormant branch, barely
orange, bought off the internet—you call,
as you always do when I am doing something
I love. You talk about medical appointments,
a watercolor class, your suspicion of social media.
My wife returns to the yard with glasses of ice water,
you hear the sound through the phone and recount
the story of a man who claimed ice crystals react
to human intention. He grouped people around glasses
of tap water, made them pray, or share gratitude,
express anger, and love. Under the microscope, he saw
that fractals formed pleasing patterns when influenced
by words like peace and acceptance—the geometry
grew along symmetrical vectors—perfection.
In contrast evil, Adolph Hitler, heavy metal, hate
caused the crystals to contort, their dimensions
deviating from normative forms, unrecognizable
as frost or ice. You tell me you've started your own
experiment in your freezer: a single glass of water
wrapped in a rubber band and a slip of paper,
the word Love penned on its surface. You tell me
all you’ve got now is a glass full of ice. We say
I love you and goodbye, our words a shroud
around what is unsaid: the lying, the conversion
therapy, the glacier of slow growing tolerance.
The water gone, I roll the ice left in my glass
and look at the sky. Soon it will rain and I think
of the tree, waiting to be planted. The rain will
be a good start toward soft, round peaches,
the kind with flesh that slips easily from the stone.

Pigeon Pages

ORIGIN

after Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde

On the bank of the Loire River, where it splits
around nests of loose branches, islands of debris,
sinewy roots, my family vacations by a pool,
their voices broken by the clatter of cut crystal.

I am alone in the chateau hotel room watching
myself lay back in the gilded mirror opposite
the canopied queen bed. Fleur-de-lis shine
on the satin sheets and night blue wallpaper

like the starry eyes of saints. I strip down to
pale skin, push my knees apart, and recognize
the reflection: a chaos of sable strokes above
a dark crease, a blush-tipped ridge running

into deeper, ever redder folds. But unlike her,
painted headless in shadow, I am unshrouded
studying my image, directing the penetrating
gaze, clutching the center of it with my hands.

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✧ Winner of the 2021 Prose & Poetry Contest ✧
Selected by Jihyun Yun

SOMETHING LIVING

From the market we buy Early Girl
tomato plants, pre-caged in plastic
pots, labeled Patio Ready. We set
them on the south side of the house,
beyond the eaves to reach the rain.
We tell each other that our lives
have grown too full to tend a garden,
that too much has happened since
the last summer when we started
from seed, that this abundance
of sunlight and sky deserves a shot
at even small, hard-fleshed fruit.
A friend calls to say she’s due
for surgery soon, to remove a tumor
from her uterus. She was prepping
for pregnancy and felt something
foreign forming. The surgeon held
up two cupped hands and said,
“Picture a softball or a grapefruit.”
She settled on a grapefruit, if only
to honor her body’s ability to bear
something living, even these bitter
cells that only know how to grow.

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TO EAT AN ORTOLAN

For centuries, we’ve caught the songbirds
in nets and slit their eyes. Darkness
drives them to gorge on grain, their bodies
bloat with fat, soft as fallen figs, no larger
than a curled thumb in a cupped palm.
Then drowned in brandy and plucked,
pan-seared and plated, the bird is eaten
in a single bite, pinched at the beak
and placed, feet first, into the mouth.

It was a priest in the 17th century
who first shrouded himself before consuming
an ortolan. He had heard of the fatty meal,
imagined the salt crisped skin on his tongue,
wished for the deep crush of bone
between his teeth. Seated at the table,
the golden body before him, he unfolded
his cloth napkin, draped it over his head
and took the bird into his mouth.

The human body anticipates pleasure
and prepares. As fat cooks and clouds
the air, saliva seeps up from under the tongue,
the pulse of blood flushes the cheeks.
We lick our lips, our eyes black as seeds,
our teeth wait, sharp in our mouths.
Is pleasure greater when braided with shame?
To eat is to sustain, but to feast is to succumb
to another kind of hunger.

In school I skipped class with another girl
to walk the wooded trail and sit where
a tabletop rock overlooked the town.
Barely touching, we watched the birds hang
above us, weightless between branches.
When it began to rain, she held her coat
over our heads. Dry in the darkness, breathing
in the other’s breath, we pressed our lips
together, her tongue alive in my mouth.

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RETURNING TO THE BASTILLE

Beyond the gaze of the gilded
statue with his torch and broken
chain, after our high school tour
guide turned us loose, liquor
and French syllables slipping
from our lips, You shouldn't
love me so much, you said
before blacking out. I said
something I would repeat
to myself later, I'm sorry.
Back at the hotel, we smoked
rolled cigarettes, twisted
our wrists through the slotted
balcony bars. Inside the room
bodies and bottles, one boy fingered
your bra strap, another tongued
your ear, the third held a camera
and made a record of you
trying to disappear. Watching
you with them was like
watching wild creatures crowd
a clutch of bloody muscle.
I thought then that the worst
part was already knowing
what they'd find with you:
a relief of warmth, a body
aching to abandon itself, a girl
open to obliteration. Now
I see what I wanted from you
was not different enough.

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ADMISSION

Sitting at the small table, suspended over
the street by the transparent floor and
wall-sized windows of the second story
hotel restaurant, we must have looked like
a couple to the passing pedestrians below,
his salt and pepper beard opposite my round,
young face. My father slipped the thin stem
of the wine glass between his ring and middle
fingers, cradling the clear curve in his palm,
I understand why you love women, he said
raising his eyes from the cup to meet mine,
I love women too. Then he asked me to join
him in the basement bar on Sainte-Catherine’s
where he’d go with his college buddies to
drink beer and fold dollars into the dancers’
string bikinis. As I imagined us from outside
the glass gallery, our faces filtered by silent,
stark flakes, I understood his invitation to be
an offering, a sign of acceptance, so that I too
could sit with my legs wide open, stalk a room
with my eyes, be counted among the powerful.

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