First Piercing
“The flesh dreams toward permanence”
— Mark Doty, “Paul’s Tattoo”
The studs are hip-grade titanium, she says,
and I’m back in traction in third grade, hoping
the break won’t need a replacement or bone-screws,
pins, any additional endoskeleton. I don’t want
to be cast in adamantium, don’t want to become
a Terminator. And yet, years later, here I am, drilling
holes in this precious flesh, letting her insert rods
like mosquito tongues, the stingers of wasps, each
capped with an opal to show my nonconformity,
spectral rainbows trapped and mounted, pinned,
my first penetrations through these neo-natural orifices,
and now it’s too late to back out: they can’t be removed
for months, I’m told, or the holes will clench
and close, welcome refused, waste of time and materials.
Queers:
Be brilliant, not broken. Let punctures be where
our grace glisters. Choose when to bloom, what
to graft to your sap, each modification a new
puberty: see: this is how I should have grown,
how I clothe my bones, the form with which I adorn
my normalcy. I am more than mortal now.
Diagnosis
Moth-like, it has
hung so long
on the curtain-lace
of her mind, we
are almost caught
by surprise when its
acknowledgment
reveals how much
beneath those gauze
and moondust wings
has already been
consumed
Kent Leatham is a poet, translator, public educator, and proud member of the LGBTQIA+ family. His work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He studied poetry at Emerson College and Pacific Lutheran University, taught in the California State University system, and curates the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium monthly reading series. Explore more of his work at https://kentleatham.weebly.com/.
“The flesh dreams toward permanence”
— Mark Doty, “Paul’s Tattoo”
The studs are hip-grade titanium, she says,
and I’m back in traction in third grade, hoping
the break won’t need a replacement or bone-screws,
pins, any additional endoskeleton. I don’t want
to be cast in adamantium, don’t want to become
a Terminator. And yet, years later, here I am, drilling
holes in this precious flesh, letting her insert rods
like mosquito tongues, the stingers of wasps, each
capped with an opal to show my nonconformity,
spectral rainbows trapped and mounted, pinned,
my first penetrations through these neo-natural orifices,
and now it’s too late to back out: they can’t be removed
for months, I’m told, or the holes will clench
and close, welcome refused, waste of time and materials.
Queers:
Be brilliant, not broken. Let punctures be where
our grace glisters. Choose when to bloom, what
to graft to your sap, each modification a new
puberty: see: this is how I should have grown,
how I clothe my bones, the form with which I adorn
my normalcy. I am more than mortal now.
Diagnosis
Moth-like, it has
hung so long
on the curtain-lace
of her mind, we
are almost caught
by surprise when its
acknowledgment
reveals how much
beneath those gauze
and moondust wings
has already been
consumed
Kent Leatham is a poet, translator, public educator, and proud member of the LGBTQIA+ family. His work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He studied poetry at Emerson College and Pacific Lutheran University, taught in the California State University system, and curates the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium monthly reading series. Explore more of his work at https://kentleatham.weebly.com/.
