If he hadn’t danced for me naked
standing beside his bed
where I was laid artfully legs akimbo
wrists bowed to the bedposts with his high-top shoelaces,
then I might have been tense or flinty,
albeit engorged with ruby-red anticipation
of his inevitable return, his naïve muscularity,
being stoned, being 25, his infidelity,
but my pupils dilated into cave entrances,
my face blushing as if its seat had just toppled
into the basket beneath the guillotine,
head now raised by the locks and flashed to face the crowds
roaring their acquiescence—
it was a unique set of movements,
half break, half pop,
enough for repeated slaps of his club
against his gutty gameboard abs,
not checkered red and black, but cream and mink,
a downy pattern of heady squares
until the leaking spidery bobbles were left
clinging to the hairy curls reminding him to come
to his bed again, to check my bonds, to observe his prey
so willing to become the crux for him
of frivolous exuberance—
our performance eased into the lizard frame,
primordial moaning, hot breath on my scruff,
his fierce grip on my kneepits,
offerings of poppers, not exactly burnt,
but well on the way,
and yet we weren’t looking for salvation,
just damnation,
those honeyed furry flashes that move together
as organs waltzing
to the flapping shudders and rising rib cages,
his nearly interlocking mine
in a beastly combustion drunk with rapture and dread
hot enough to consume whole vocabularies
and igniting the room’s volcanic womb
until nothing was left except seared sheets,
beard scraps, a snapped lace, and a thousand velvety blooms,
all beginning now to wash up on the sticky shore
like the driftwood on our bellies,
once mighty firs, but tumbled to begin again
for the next heroic gale.
Mikal Wix was born in Miami, Florida, of green-thumbed, hydrophilic parents. Growing up in the Melting Pot offered insights into other outlooks, and later, the visions of a revenant from the closet. He holds degrees in literature and creative writing, and his poems have found homes in Beyond Queer Words, Tahoma Literary Review, Eunoia Review, and others. When not chasing storms, he can be found in the woodlot.
Angel Rust 