after Gwendolyn Brooks and Terrance Hayes
When we found her sex positions book, we
didn’t think it was real.
My mother wasn’t cool
enough for sex. We
flipped through the pages, turning left,
studying where each body fit in this school,
the detailed figures of the man and woman, the parts we
hid under cotton, kept from the lurk-
ing skin, a hand, a finger, the late-
night moon with its borrowed light. We
lay our bodies on the bed, to strike
the pose, mimic the face down, the ass out straight.
We laughed and snorted, we
looked like pigs, sing-
ing oinks, our faces in the trough, this sin.
I don’t want to say what we did next, that we
touched our own bodies, thin
limbs reaching to what bits of hair we’d grown, the begin-
ing of a secret thing, or that we
reached for each other, a fumbled jazz
of grips, on this solstice in June.
If today, I could replay our hands’ song, we
would deny its music, when we each die-
d a little on that bed, notes ending too soon.