July 2019

DJ Hills

It was the last summer of being a boy,

holding that lie in my mouth careful not to

bite down too hard. Every Saturday,

I scraped the hair from my body because he liked it smooth

and I gave up on eating to remember how good being empty felt.

We were our own private disaster; gorging on Tito’s mixed with White Claw,

rubbing his neck while he puked, and laughing while he cried,

Why does nothing love me the way it used to?

My limbs turned hollow and weightless as bird bones;

buckling against every man-sized hand that squeezed my hips until I gasped.

I spent hours of that summer on my back, collar bone pointed at the sky in hungry accusation,

daring the sun to torch my skin so I’d feel a little less invisible.

My silhouette regressed to a warped reflection of adolescence

and the ridges of my spine were rubbed raw

against the arm of the basement couch as we fucked,

hands over my mouth so his husband didn’t hear.

I was never alone that summer. There was always a body

coming through the door or down the stairs.

That summer, I let him call me anything

which, in my rough translation, often turned out to be whore.

Every gesture seemed fixated on how small I was,

how light, and airy, and capable of collapsing

into him with no real consequences.

I was as wispy as the onion grass we yanked from his yard,

fingernails strained brown, our palms straining against the earth.

In the end, he told me the secret

to a flat stomach is to give up on being happy

as I curled my thumbs under my ribs and pushed and pushed

trying to make my body understand that this was the way it had to be.