(pleasure-knowledge) (knowledge-pain)
BY DEON ROBINSON
After Rickey Laurentiis
Afterward, you shower. You put on hot water watch the blood trickle into the drain’s many mouths. He says to cool it. He isn’t circumcised, the heat makes his dick flare. You want to turn it on max to baptize you both but a coward deserves more than one death. Settle for a make-out session, he is your boyfriend after all. He will know to touch you tender—like a man who successfully shoots a deer from outside its realm of control feigns concern at its messy death. His mother will be home soon leave your fluids at his place. When you are on the bus home, you cycle through the motions. When did his bedroom become the garden? How was he the snake, fruit, and God? Does that make you the pain which negates the loneliness? You can’t stand knowing what you’ve been: muddied creature dredging under a sky the same shade as his linen sheets.