what about the transformative power of love?

look at them

holding each other.

try to knead the cold, stiff clay of masculinity,

down it with the nascent of sisterhood,

stand witness to the utter shame of shedding tears.

(do it yourself a few times.)

Roll sadness on your tongue. It clinks against your teeth. Swallow. Feel the coolwetsharp slide, ice water on an empty stomach, tracing the intestinal tract circling crooked into itself. Hold it there in the cavernous pit of your stomach. Swallow again. Shiver.

a sticky tickling cough, a tricky staccato

blade damming the stream.

i’ll behold you in this collection of images,

my unfinished brother not of blood,

burning, feverish, furious, frenetic, bar-none.

press my hands into yours

(we will form a harbor a hearth a home.)

let’s put our sculptures out to dry in the last weeks of august,

settle next to them.

they’ll be brittle like our bones and probably meet their

fate (crushed to powder at the bottom of my backpack which bursts at the seams)

but we made them out of earth,

and the ridges of our fingertips will remain in their absence.

“i worry about us sometimes,”

the sincerest admission of love.