boyhood
BY MIYAH POWE
he loves to color the world a sugar-poem draws an atlas with the reds of himself attracted to his own whistle womb bursting and slewing without boyhood hangs tight on him wet, iced blue to his ribs storming with wind this is how he comes to define beautiful: weeping willows,circles, the number twelve, duct tape, the color pink, clean school uniforms, toothbrush bristles, gas smells at the wawa, yellowthroats, silly putty, recycling bins, both of the t’s in poinsettia, airports, rug burns, mario kart, pretending to drown in the community pool, bike tires, anything that begins with the letter q, truffle beds, trampolines, lollipop rings, his brother’s pet lizard bobo, triple-tiered german chocolate cake, christmas carols, blackberries, now that’s what I call music! karaoke sets, dahlia beds, one he saw like gold pushing up from the sun soil it is growing for him picks it up by the roots, delicate this is all he needs to hold beautiful in between his fingers, like a cave and have it carry him home to his parents what he knows: they do not want to know their flowering boy or how he loves beauty into every inhale his mother, a torn beak time stretches her across skin until it plucks braille tongue and bleak lips his father, a deep claw age rips across his face until it sinks down brillo clutch and grating fingers both, arbitrators of some kind of fact, an absolute knowing he does not want their cauterized, billowed, braking both, defenders of a seedless earth that will not break open for him he has no interest in squawking necks at war with clicking tongues the truth: his blooming is not in red hands nor tiny graves he lowers his head at stones, but doesn’t know why every night he will dry his smoky eyes hear the trembling of an anthropocene and tuck his dahlia beneath his head wakes up beside the questions breathing gently into those things: beautiful, good, agreeable this is how he comes to define big: crapshoots thrown against cracks big white everythings with no beginning or end blue, black, green, brown mighty cavities of a golden god one morning brought him a new brink his dahlia has dried, crumbled under his pillow when he picks it up he sees that it has turned into sulfur biting back down into its own veins he cries its pistol-whip petals are withered down this is how he will come to define words empty like beautiful: those things that refuse to stay gold and stain and fragment underneath his fingernails