What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems

shame

• I watched the shame leap into the pond of your face. How good we were at turning moments into paper, into things we could crumple up & throw away.

  WWL-001

• O the horror if you turned & saw it pinned against the tree — your secret, dripping sweet with seeds, the person whom you're meant to be unleashed without permission.

  WWL-007

• If I could draw the line at my wrist, wear it like a bracelet, then this primal touch could never be as unforgivable as kissing, as hoping he knew my name.

  WWL-003

self-and-identity

• The backwards ball cap, the Abercrombie clothes — all just fabrics, a hand-stitched invisibility cloak to hide the boy who used to try on his sister's dresses.

  WWL-002

• My father, clearly not quite sure how to handle the death of an s, sat wordless — I watched him slip away into the safety of the bleachers.

  WWL-006

intimacy

• The two of us still holding our own internalized homophobia like great big onions in our hands, hovering, both scared of the stench.

  WWL-004