4/Devotion

- If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land -

Isaiah 1:19-20

She taught him how to survey the valleys of his body and declare beauty where beauty was still fraught. Under her watch, he became a faulty cartographer, walking the coast of his torso and charting illusions and errs: never looking down, because, as she said, what is not mapped is not seen, and believing what is invisible is always optional.

She taught him how to see anew:

To see fantabulations and bury facts in mud,

turning certainty into a phantom to be warded off with swaying hips, sharp protruding fingers, and the shrill melody of an artificial voice made habit.

Everything he did, he did for her.

And as his vision was reborn, he became a reflection of vibrance,

getting clearer-and-clearer until she stood back, and saw the beauty of her creation.

Just like her, but with edges- a little more jagged, and joints- a little more stiff.

She gazed upon him, around each corner, and under every fold:

inside the crook of his neck and down the arching hills of his back,

and saw the same type of beauty that she only found in herself.

And she saw that it was good.

With his new vision, every moment became dreamy.

His body: a marsh moving out-only-to-move-back-in.

Every surface: fallacious, flexible, unimportant.

He spent the day walking through dreams: his feet sinking into the ground,

and dreams spent lying beside her.

Shoulders nested in the cool earth,

this touch: somehow real in an imaginary world.

Was it a dream, also

when she took his hand in hers?

When they splayed out against each other in the reeds,

and pecked at each other's breasts?

Was it a dream when everything else started spinning?

And when she entered him completely:

body-in-body

How they vibrated together, complete for this precious moment,

only to collapse apart, sticky and shattered?

Was it a dream when she slipped in the mud, trying to run from him?

how the mud soiled her dress and clung in her hair?

how she turned around, her face falling apart,

shrieking obscenities in a language he had never heard:

purely-melodic, purely-blues?

He woke dazed.

He pressed his fingers to his stomach to find a pit that was not there before.

Looking down, he saw it:

stretching across him, completely empty except entirely filled

by the idea of what was once there.

He stopped dreaming,

or at least, he couldn't remember anything anymore.

What he couldn't forget, however,

was that emptiness - that emptiness so deep

it began to sing.

He never knew,

whether he was looking for the completeness she gave,

or the limits of the emptiness she created.

Dear you,

You who held me close between my knees and spun me, eyes closed, sensing only the force of your turning, the force of your body against mine. You who sculpted me, hunched over my spinning body, hands gently pulling the small of my back, whirling my hips up and down.

You who helped me turn 19 by showing me your nipple, then falling asleep: my body a new quivering shape in the room. Who, when I stood to leave, offered me a $20 to stay.

You who made me feel too uncomprehensive to be anyone's-anything: picking cherry skin from your teeth and recounting how my whole life seems ‘disjointed.’ Asking me: where you could see me ‘no-filter’ - saying you would be scared to see what happens. After we met, my whole mouth hurt for days - sour cherries and a tongue swollen with lies.

You who remembers being ‘like me,’ who remembers donning your mother's dress, who laughed as you stumbled out of heels too big, and posed, transfixed by the mirror that showed a boy becoming something you saw as visionary. This femininity of youth, once exciting, remembered now as an embarrassing mark on your history. You who say you don't hate her, yet grimace when you see that once visionary boy in the body beside you, believing that her femininity, too, is something to be resolved.

You who peed behind a couch on 85th street and let me feed you mayonnaise from a spoon. With our hands pressed into the curb, your mouth full of smoke, you told me that I am like a ‘magical little fairy,’ floating in and out of your life, untouchable and opportune. I looked at my hands: tools of the trade you gave me: indented from the concrete.

You who sat still in my bed like an operating table, afraid to touch the body you called ‘crazy.’ Who said I was the first ‘guy you ever kissed’ - when I chuckled at this metric and stood to unclasp my bra, your eyes drew an absent haze. How I moved quickly for you: operating in double time.

You who held my arms above my head and floated above me as I writhed. You who had the eyes of a beast. You who sought out cross-dressers because they were ‘easier,’ and ‘girls thought you were ugly anyway.’ You who became a new ritual: one where I confused spectacle with pleasure, and service with power.

You who turned off my smoke alarm. Who said that you couldn't drive after you finished because your head was ‘spinning.’ Who rinsed off and held me while we talked about Andre 3000, and Egypt, middle school, and horse tattoos. You who I knew I would never call again.

You who said you wish I had a clit, knowing that I wish I had one too. You who were texting her while you held my hand in the hospital: her whom I dreamt about for weeks, who was every woman I couldn't be. You who loved me. You who, became afraid of me, who made me afraid of myself.

Dear You,

who left me touched instead of connected,

when you told me to dance,

knowing that I only do this dance for her/

He got home, took off all his clothes, and scrubbed his skin until it shone, yet it still felt a little dull around that waist where you grasped him, scaly on the face where you kissed him. He smelled like you, and his mouth tasted like you, no matter how much he brushed or cleansed, or how many prayers he made, or how many things he gave up - still smelled like you. That stench of ‘bad’ decisions and ‘close’ calls, transactions devoid of exchange: the smell of being an alien in the bed he was called to, and the taste of a finger pressing him through jeans too tight, hands moving him on top of you: all poised, all swishy.

After cleaning, and praying, and cleaning again, he looked into himself in the mirror.

The reflection that blinked back at him, once a radiant-unreal-vision,

was now a matte imitation of what he had lost.

Where he lost it, he, couldn't say.

But its residue was fixed:

in his oddly pursed lips,

or his brow ridge,

in the lines that danced along his arms,

and the cavity dug out in his chest.

These shattered parts: stuck together with the absence of a dream,

floating. A mosaic made in the glassy pane.

He closed his eyes and saw nothing.

Then opened them and saw her:

trapped right in front of him.