Allowed

You would wish long and long … to sit by him in the boat that you
and he might touch each other ever so lightly … what is this then?
 
1.
 
Sometimes I binge gay movies
in bed until my neck cricks, bad ones
with no plot and women as abbreviated
as the first girl I dated—I’m so sorry
for them—as if no director had ever seen
a woman with actual eyebrows,
who can do anything other than
pull men into orbit around each other
but this white, this tall
this thankful-for-almost-all-
my-Y-gave-me gay
this world-forgets-it-wasn’t-made-for-me gay
this actually-it-was, this good boy
this don’t-all-boys-know-their-mother’s-
favorite-flower gay with the insatiable roots
sucks every scene dry.
 
I just want my mother to be spared.
I just want to be held
forgettable in this field
where I bring a bouquet of wild
boys to my lips like the only
flowers for miles and miles
are gay flowers and I
am as uneventful
as any blossom.
 
2.
Just off Mass Ave, by the gay crosswalks, my eyes turned on
to a young man, a curl locked to his forehead, the wind
 
mussing his fresh cut of lilacs, gray undergarments flashing
beneath their green Monroe skirts, a beauty exiting
 
the poem I found him in, despite trying to staple him down
like the receipt on my lunch bag, fluttering with luxury
 
and the scent of garlic, lilac, Nama Shoyu, magnolia
dropping their pink applause all over my poem
 
is more electric than yours because I’m allowed to want
to see him again, to spin a double-take right here on the sidewalk
 
with everything there is to inhale, to smell every smell of this
         moment,
smells enough for everyone, like the girl in the pink snapback, her
         skateboard
 
eddying a puff of petals, who furrows an eyebrow at me, then him
then wrinkles her nose like a Blood hound about to howl
 
then rolls on.