1. To Wish I Might

To Wish I Might


Knitted by faith and hate,
the child’s face open over another boy’s,
his body spitting the loosed
blood over him—Please,

the other pleads
Now that it’s summer
and the other boy is at the beach,
gulls circling, his sweet meat
swelling into the sand as he
licks a salty palm.

This is not death, not even a little.

Still afraid, even as he finishes,
to hit him again, to knock him off,
to tell him No. It’s clear
what they both want, opposite ends

of a similar display.
Or he’ll find a drawer
in a friend’s room, a box locked
tight as a body, and in it:
full-on pink. Even now, if nothing else,
there was that friend whose name
no longer matters, glossy page
full of gummed sex: one cock
among so much pink…

…do we wish on that same star?