Tally of Queerdom

{in no particular order}

4.

She lifts her suit trousers
to reveal her rainbow socks.
Little sparkly letters spell out
My Lucky Socks. Quick sexy
squint, sideways smirk. She is
a bent light beam in a gray
cubicle farm. I will go home
with her tonight.

11.

I am a whisky julep. Spread
sweaty on the floor. I’ve lost an
earring. Sore hips. I am some shade
of marmalade. There is melted sunset
all over the carpet. I have never spilled
in this shape before. She licks the inside
of my ankle. Tells me it tastes like peaches.

2.
The back porch is washed in
the milk paint of moonlight.
The garden is showing off its
unruly curves. Teasing me with
twelve shades of green and the
sweet scent of curry. I am alone
with my body. More turned on than
I can recall. The highway behind
the house shouts as loud as my veins.
I stroke the wisteria. Whisper, what
have you done to me?

8.

We take turns giggling. Shifting from
femme bones to boy bones. Quiet
maneuvering through the landscape
of energies. Identity is a swing. We are
straddled like spiders.

13.

She tells the catfish story to the
redneck like she is sliding a hook
through his fat, watering mouth.
Unlike his story of the prize-winning
Monster Blue, hers ends with a
stringer full of fish corpses, eaten
alive by raccoons. I like her story.

Mostly I like how his face changed
from salesman to friend as soon
as she dropped the trotline. Also,
I like to imagine her perched easy
on red sandstone, speaking release
to the shore.

7.
In the kitchen, she presses me
against the counter and kisses
me madly. Her brother’s wife
saunters in to refresh her mint
julep and gasps. Stumbles back
to the living room.

Later, she confides, that her husband
has never kissed her so deeply. She
has never been caught in the act.
We all have different ways of fastening
our sex shut. Slipping a nametag
in our underwire. Zipping up our strange
beneath pin striped trousers.

12.

I am more terrified of monogamy/
commitment/entrapment than I am
of lesbian/bisexual/wild woman/queer.
Wedding rings look like handcuffs. I do
not want a circle drive or master bedroom.

I don’t care what the neighbors think.
I tackle her on the couch just before
the L-word snags my cheek. She knows
how easy it is for a poet to get all tangled
in the reel. Instead, she says applesauce.

Asks me to be her jellyfish. I lick her
accountant ears. Tell her they taste like
good sense.

1.

I am thirteen. On the bus headed
to church camp. My first boyfriend
nervously asks me if I would ever
kiss a girl. I explain my clumsy

theory of the spectrum for the
first time. How we are shades of
masculine and feminine. How I kiss
beings, not genders or races or wallets. 

Sixteen years later, he tells me the
night before we talked on the bus,
he kissed his best friend, Greg.
He’s never told anyone. Today he 
called just to thank me for that.