&his &his       refer to them only by number

56: his gloved hand reached for my lips

and found a fence

so I shoved my hands into his ribs

until I was his empty fingered god

8: long arms       basketball scholarship

I press my everything into his back

one of the only men I ever held

26: called me a faggot

I took him at the knees

55: Tore my groin by a laying on of hands

when I hold my lover   my hips moans his work

///

I also play linebacker

here my name sits ready

a stone ripening in the belly

of the lake upon which surely

there is a house which I am not

invited to          and this too

is longing

there the athletic Black kids

drink with the rich white kids

half clothed in the lip of a boat

and this too demands my eyes

this too drives me sick with thirst

so I dress everything in my thunder

I lay down boy after boy on the field

and this is how I teach my presence

a pedagogy of desperation

I lord of this home I do not pay for

I lord of this body and its borrowed armor

I lord of a kingdom of inches

I crack a boy       out of this house

my cheek give way to the scarlet tang of pride

the chant gets the pronunciation just right

and this must be love

this chaos that blooms into my name

///

After the game we all draped in the thick stink of glory

undressed in our palace of chipped paint in a rich kid school

and what I know of desire        is a secret I keep from myself

a boy grabs at my dick      and calls me faggot for dodging

and this is how I know I am something like home

smiling in my boxers and stretching the scar tissue

of my rusted hip        &meeting nobody’s eyes

YOU GOT MCDONALD’S MONEY?

“I don’t even want you to look at nothing,
so you gotta go in there with your eyes closed.”

BERNIE MAC

My father told me two things; a religion of sorts. Don’t eat these white folks’ food when there’s food in the house and Stop starving yourself, you making it look like I don’t feed you. And he did. For years I did not dream of empty, but chose it in the name of purity. I learned hunger and whiteness in the same place. I know how to refuse and not mean it; the only evidence a fist beneath the table, four half-moons sitting in my empty palm. Everything my mouth does is a sin, a windowless church swallowing the breeze. I drip No thank you by instinct; if I’m hungry, I’m nobody’s child. If I never kissed the fingers of a foreign hand, I would have made for an exceedingly small casket. I still might.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS #20

His arm frayed just below