The problem was, I fell in love with a boy
from the desert. A boy who had never seen
the ocean until he was fourteen, and when he
did, scooped sand into his mouth to compare it
with Coconino’s silt. Then again, when confronted
with the ocean the first time, I paid more attention
to a jellyfish washed up on shore—flattened glass cup
of its body I could have mistaken for a melted
plastic heap. I’m mistaken all the time for one type
of boy or another from the way I speak
with my hands, or from the husk puberty stashed
in my throat. And how many men have I flicked
through on my phone, broken the link one swipe
right has forged because they missed bi in my profile
and on first dates had more questions about how
I could want to fuck both men and women and I’m just
so exhausted with fucking. I meant to say, talking
about fucking. I only ever wondered where the desert
boy’s fingers had been when he told me
about Arizona’s red cliffs—if he had clung
to those sandstone rungs, scaled a mesa’s edge
for some personal record or because climbing
higher really does get you closer to God and
his hands were proof of that, the ridges cleaved
deeper by sharp rock. I imagined the landscape
altered his fate in that way—palms a map
with a new river shredded across them by the Buckskin
Mountains, oxbow of head creased into heart.
So what if the real problem was I needed him
too much? For so long I went out with my head
cocked back, throat open and tongue splayed
beneath gray clouds for rain. In one story, a man
held the whole sea in his mouth, but I found
the Atlantic’s salt sting intolerable. No doubt
drops of the Great Lakes still flash through
my guts. When I told the boy freshwater is also
called sweetwater, he didn’t believe me.
Even with canyons etched below his fingers,
all the water I poured slid from his bowled hands.
(Brian Czyzyk)