as a man gathering flowers
beside the road, his totaled
car smoking in a ditch.
dear lord, you can yank my chain as hard as you want,
even if it hurts, as long as it doesn’t kill me.
for you know my stupidest desires, the ones that will
go unsealed, unsent, forever: to drink a beer in front of someone’s
hot stepdad and lose his number; to haul a sweating brick of
ice into the back of a truck in the desert. you know i crave exertion,
just another dog off the leash; throw me a rope, a field, a firm hand on my
knee. i want, i want. what does it mean, the wanting?
lacuna waxing and waning without reason, like a cloud in the shape of the
moon. i want to write a poem so sheer its
nipples are showing. a poem to be rescued from an
open flame (and no cheating, no licking the fingers first). though my
practice of devotion gathers dust in its mouth, i thank you for the
quotidian, lord: this lurch that goes nowhere, these dozen hothouse
roses. i thank you for desire, flashing forest green on the eye.
sweet lord, the part of me that bites death into my ears is yours, and the part
that slouches and laments, and also the part that stands flush with
useless desire, lapping at the rain. i want to write a poem that does not
veil this world, but reveals it. i want to shuffle letters until they shape the magic
words. but it’s too late–the only poem is already here, its vertebrae unfurling in
xerarch succession, drawing its breath up from an invisible well. like how,
yearning on that mountain, all moses heard was an aleph, the larynx’s
zipper clicking its first tooth back into place.
Adrian Matias Bell is a queer and trans writer and musician working on unceded Ohlone land. His work has previously appeared in Dialogist, Beaver Magazine, Echolocation, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where he edited PRISM international. He also makes music as Nightjars.