History Is After Us
BY CHAD MORGAN
Finalist for the 2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program
like hounds raised on flesh & starving to please their masters' curses & traumas are generational: we bury our sons before we’ve finished mourning their fathers you can learn a thing too early & lose it too late: what bodies are useful & used who calls the shots around here & the police how to love this land bitter & inhospitable trees that don our dead for decoration rivers digesting our men giving them back bloated & fish-chewed waves of grain amber with our blood mountains purple with the echo of our outrcy if we run fast it’s because we are trying to outrun history if occasionally we break out in song it’s because we are so tired
Hometown Glory
BY CHAD MORGAN
Finalist for the 2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program
Before learned I should master
my body’s dainty inclinations & stony
every soft inch of me with fraternal
inheritance, I discovered men’s arms
& navels, men’s bony angles & jaws.
It was spring; my mother’s marigolds
bloomed anyway; I came to Jesus
over & over. Believing in the possibility
of conversion, I sat in the doctor’s ramshackle
office, dignified his invasive
line of questioning. When I left I said
I wouldn’t go back & didn’t. The long road
out of there was straight but overrun
with dangers. Thieves came near masked
as friends. Men hid red histories
in their sleeves even they didn’t know. Now
when I go back down it I recognize signposts
& landmarks like images from a dream that means
nothing yet won’t be forgotten: The house
on Hiawatha where I was discovered
by my father, in drag as his wife. The pool
where I held my breath too long underwater.
The locker room where Eric Frye
showed everyone his penis. The junior high
where Colin Yoder didn’t want to kiss me,
where it seemed that no boy would. The park
where the news said men were arrested
for lewd behavior & the nights I parked
there & waited. The diner where James
outed me to everyone. The parking lot behind it
where I made out with a boy for the first time.
The high school where I wouldn’t call him
my boyfriend & the bedroom where I bargained
desire for mercy. This year, the marigolds
have bloomed as always, determined to see
their seeds’ work through, & it is all I can do
not to crush them: they are so smug in their
flower beds, so sure of themselves.
