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Heart Lake: or, Poem for the Mistaken Boy
- Red Hen Press
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97 Heart Lake: or, Poem for the Mistaken Boy At Heart Lake, some fucking kid shouts at me he’s been gutting fish where I swim, and asks if I like swimming in “dead fish guts.” He’s fat like me, with longish hair. Beside me in the water, my girlfriend turns and asks what that little girl on shore is saying. I think, Shit, it’s going to be at least a decade before this boy can develop a reasonable beard —someone should at least get him to trim his hair. But it won’t be me. I don’t have the heart to teach the boy what I had to learn. I’m too shocked with the thought that twelve years ago, when I was proud with a ponytail, and even tubbier than now, the woman I love might have seen me as less than all male. So my comeback is limp. I yell, “Saying dead fish guts is redundant.” “The killing,” I shout, “is implied.” ...