American Sonnet w/ A God Complex
BY DONTE COLLINS
You’re doing it again—debating the use of beauty. I’m sorry, really.
I haven’t been to a party in over a year and I keep needing
to ask everyone if they’ve bought a gun too. So I feel most American
when I’m masturbating. Or maybe when the DoorDash driver leaves
my food in the lobby. Or when my boyfriend begs to be degraded.
It’s all the same, really: Fetch. Now he’s guiding my hands to his throat.
I kiss every inch of him until he cries then slap him. It’s okay, I whisper.
Let it out, I dig. I enter him in increments, as rain would stitch starlight
into marsh. You’re doing it again—confessing everything but the point.
Who knows, I’ve only been alive once and so far l’d rather God’s austere
silence. What’s love got to do w/ it? What’s love but a second-hand smoke?
I’d go ghost too if my poems kept begging for a mercy they were born
to invent. What earth-awful static. Yeah, I’d build a gate w/ the leftover
bones. Use me Daddy, our lonely music. Yeah yeah I’d paint it pearl too.
