By June, I thought I would’ve figured out
what it meant to be a man: learning when
to say bro, dude, & fuck & whittling skinny
spare sticks into something I can kill with.
The damp days became stagnant:
my AC shuddered to its bitter end, my room
smelled of death & mid-summer existentialism.
I rotted in bed under the heaviness of
growing pains, wondering if I really meant it.
Growing up, I knew I didn’t want to become
anything horrible: no trembling walls or shattered
whiskey glasses. There was that pre-teen summer:
the girls & I squatting on the yellow river bank, drawing up
our flashlights. We wondered if what the woman-mouth named
monster sat on the other side & what death they would
surely bring. I couldn’t keep myself from staring down at my palms.
When I outgrew my gender & jeans, my biggest fear was the
hair they said would sprout from my arms & chest,
women curving around my path like a split school
of minnows. In the night I dreamed for a different kind of
manhood, imaginary & impossible as a wet July
afternoon. I prayed for a different kind of puberty.
I wanted manhood soft & unscorned without being
named traitor. I wanted my mother to look me in
the eyes without that sorrowful, pinched look.
Which part is predator? Which part is prey? I imagine
the scene of our old kitchen of chipped china &
chaos, where my father would pull all the oxygen
from my mother’s lungs. She would be standing there
–the scene painted nectar by sundown–holding me in her
dishwater-pruned hands. My grandmother is there too.
She says: bury it, or it’ll grow up to become
something monstrous.