from Queer

Prologue

Let them be dead.

Let them be dead then.

For I have taken many deaths.

My face was drawn in the uterus with the pointed edge of a protractor. One line drawn down the center of my brain, down and away from the widow’s peak, to the flattened bridge of my nostrils—the waters of my mother’s belly forced a slant upon the tip of my nose—down toward the lips and jawline. One can measure my head in one conjunctive assembly and find the skull, the mask of the skull to resemble that of a fleeting comet. My eyes bear the privacy and protection of men unlike me.

My mother died upon my birth and I have imagined her cliffed over the edge of a wooden gurney with a webbed thigh, her womb stretched out and bloody.

He, too, my father, he, too, is dead.

It was a gesture of protest—for he had wished to be cremated; but, I did not . . . cremate . . . him—once, he stood on the vein of an open road, waiting for me to return from my Bible practices, when he saw, at that exact moment, my pursed lips, the luring magnet of a lover, through the foliage of the trees.

He had been there after the beasts had come.

They had come that afternoon.

I cannot tell you about the events that led to the blows without first . . . oh, there lives in my head one chorus, one voice and orb, at this very moment, it lives there . . . I must tell you, now, that there is only, that there is only love.

For I loved him.

I loved Schevoski.

And he had as much to do with my being there, in that cave, as my father, as the others, and I cannot continue without first telling you about Schevoski.

It was an exchange; it was the episodic, auxiliary elation of an accident.

He had touched me, you see, he had touched me first—somewhere between the eyes— and he had done so privately.

I remember now the exact position of the paper elephant.

We had paused in our verses and had begun cutting things out for the Ark and an instrument, a tool, something linear and intimate, rolled out from under him, from under Schevoski, and he had gone to retrieve it there under the desk and we were there together, the others conversing, and he, he kissed me.

He lifted his finger and I can see, even now can I see it, its methodical banter, how it lingered in mid-air amidst the chaos of that new and private world we had never encountered and it landed in the center of my forehead.

Oh, the feeling of it, that new and private thing, sent an electrifying chill through my afore abstract predicament.

It was, it was the feeling of elation one feels when the radius of a star lulls in front of him; when a line is drawn in its center and magnified in his dreams. There is something there, an otherwise breached timidity; nothing, nothing there was breaking.

In that sanctimonious incline, that slope and we were there in it together, and I can see him now, Schevoski, vividly, the pulsating vein near his clavicle and oh, now, how it pulsates under his skin, glowing and pertinent, in its incubator.

He was broad-shouldered, his pale face coppered with a fingerprint.

His hair was yellow.

There it was between us, the paper elephant.

He took it inside his hands, and leaned into me.

He kissed me.

And I can see now, too, the manner in which he left me there, before whispering something promiscuous in my ear, and how I had come out of the world of intimacy to find him standing amidst the Others, shoving his eye through a hole in the paper elephant with the smirk of a Centaur.

He asked if I would meet him there.

Yes, yes, I whispered.

I would meet him there.

I promised him that.

My father slept.

The cattle were roaming in the entrapment the world had caused. I lowered my head between the...