Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Face

(As published in the Coe Review [http://coereview.org/] in our Fall 2013 issue... please excuse the vulgarity.)


Face

I feel his breath but don’t see his face,
feel, rather than see, the rips in his jeans,
the bruise beneath his left, wilting eye,
and vodka with the lingering and opaque tint of
Ibuprofen still drips between the thin slits in his lips as they touch my own.
I smell the cigarette that he pulled from the mouth of the crew-cut lesbian
a clit-licking butch
run down by an SUV outside,
feel the sharply ridged ladder,
cut crudely
from his wrist
to bicep.
he’s a faggot
He’s incredible.
He’s hopeful,
on his knees
to suck your cock
to pray
for sunlight and for a crosswalk,
for eyes to replace his ears.
 
I don’t see his face
because the strobe light carves through the pitch blackness,
because my eyes can’t adjust,
because you can’t take your head out of his crotch
because I could love him,
because he has no face,
because his face is my face and their faces and the face of the boy
who loves a boy and of the lesbian
the dead cunt
and of the other women
in the grime-lathered underpass by the street—
fucking other women,
loving other women—
and I have no face,
 
but the boy has a tongue.

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