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  • Ode to Big Trend, and: At Pegasus
  • Terrance Hayes (bio)

Ode to Big Trend

Pretty soon the Negroes were looking to get paid. My partner, Big Trend, wiped his ox neck and said

He wasn’t going to wait too much longer. You Know that look your daddy gets before he whups you?

That’s how Big Trend looked. There was a pink scar Meddling his forehead. Most people assumed a bear

Like him couldn’t read anything but a dollar. But I’d watched him tour the used bookstore In town and seen him napping so I knew he held more

Than power in those hands. They could tear A Bible in two. Sometimes on the walk home I’d hear

Him reciting poems. But come Friday, he was the one The fellas asked to speak to the boss. He’d go alone,

Usually, and left behind, we imagined the boss buckled Into Trend’s shadow because our money always followed.

—Reprinted with the permission of the poet [End Page 128]

At Pegasus

They are like those crazy women   who tore Orpheus     when he refused to sing,

these men grinding   in the strobe & black lights     of Pegasus. All shadow & sound.

“I’m just here for the music,”   I tell the man who asks me     to the floor. But I have held

a boy on my back before.   Curtis & I used to leap     barefoot into the creek; dance

among maggots & piss,   beer bottles & tadpoles     slippery as sperm;

we used to pull off our shirts,   & slap music into our skin.     He wouldn’t know me now

at the edge of these lovers’ gyre,   glitter & steam, fire,     bodies blurred sexless

by the music’s spinning light.   A young man slips his thumb     into the mouth of an old one,

& I am not that far away.   The whole scene raw & delicate     as Curtis’s foot gashed

on a sunken bottle shard.   They press hip to hip,     each breathless as a boy

carrying a friend on his back.   The foot swelling green     as the sewage in that creek.

We never went back.   But I remember his weight     better than I remember

my first kiss.   These men know something     I used to know.

How could I not find them   beautiful, the way they dive & spill     into each other,

the way the dance floor   takes them,     wet & holy in its mouth.

—Reprinted with the permission of the poet [End Page 129]
Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Wind in a Box (2006); Hip Logic (2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

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