Your face like a stomach in winter, all
nauseous with snow.

Your face vulnerable as Hades and you drinking
until your abdomen cramps up
like a manmade lake.

Your face is not at all shadow.

Your face is wide and open as summer curtains.
and hurt as shot wolf.

Dead wolf.
My uncle eats wolf for breakfast.
I take you to meet my uncle on a Sunday morning.
He prays before we eat.
Your face is cratered with doubt.
I take your hand
and I squeeze it underneath the table,
hard as the statue of a god.

Later in winter our hands are squeezing gods
underneath a blanket in somebody else’s living
room. After that outside with dark and ice and sidewalk.
Your mouth and my mouth and your arms and my
arms and we are trying to stand up straight.

You are the wrong boy. Every boy is the wrong boy.
I go to sleep in mornings and wake up late
afternoons, in dreams I am screaming to gods I’ve never
prayed to. When I wake up I am sick to my stomach.
Always with a bloated stomach, my body always
part of a ****** battle that you seem no longer to want
to be a part of.