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Hence the contaminated river I once named embittered walkway
to a prison village is now my hand, o chronic thing
that rarely hides! A man is meant to unclasp, trigger it.
A man is meant to be seen talking to a stone
in the form of a crocodile's head. Perhaps kindness is
only possible when deadly. Perhaps we want to be
saved by our fatal capacity. A hallucinating, what keeps
torture on hold, this thin hair strand, diagnostic, in which termites
walk through to get to my head. Destruction, I've always wanted
to hark back, whoever is not here was welcome. Elsewhere,
tell me if you could see when your embodiment swallows
a scar, clears a familiar mud print, burns a dog bone, a whole-
some face. Tell me you care in distance. I've tried to frighten
myself by knowing who I am and can be without fantasies. Well,
these men, calculated torsos to be exact, spending the night with stars
and laughter are friends, brides of what monstrosity dictates.
In excess of fact, I've known these giants for so long.
When reminded I'm bigger than their want, they return
into the shape I don't know how to eat. If I killed them
I wouldn't be jealous of myself, which is to say: possessions
no matter how absent possess me, I can make up my own devices,
here a natural mask and my skull trying to build a spectacular
breakdown. Call it a song and the dead stand for it. So too time has that
characteristic: a second describes the next hour to what may only be hidden
in the future—surely it's a dying mammal—only to find that forthcoming body
sooner and fixed on a distant wheelchair, great capital viewed by way of a fog.
Shortly I'm able to make a hospital, but my giants don't know how to help
a marginal be lost or found, they're not as disciplined as magic.
With groggy yeses of ripe dark there's a moon waning
to take you out. I say it's raining and it's raining. I say
ready pretty boy and you agree. Look at this chaos, look at us
swimming in blood-thickened spittle, but this only paves the way
to kiss. Soon my giants, everything telling that we're drowning and,
yes, we're hardly breathing. We can't see the mouth of the sea,
yes, we don't know how to escape, we haven't loved ourselves
other than when shipped to a territory overturned in advance.
Ever since we were opposed by our own body sex has accomplished
a highly esteemed status: XXYY. The first time I shot a flesh-eating fish,
spaded the organ of an immortal feeling, caged the messenger
of memory I knew I could leave a gem inside you, a body
persistently foreign to what it protects. For this I'm able to make
a surplus bag and, please, take it as my house. Get inside and wake me.
Tell the high tide, the greater trauma that personifies it one thing
forgivable about disaster. We can't undo what's about to happen.
Love, never will you pass up the chance to die accompanied.
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B.B.P. HOSMILLO is a queer poet of color. Author of The Essential Ruin (forthcoming), his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Missing Slate, The Ilanot Review, Assaracus, and many others. His honors include research fellowships/scholarships from the Japan Foundation, Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the Republic of Indonesia. Currently, he is finishing a manuscript titled Breed Me. Contact him at bryphosmillo@yahoo.com.
in issue sixteen
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