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.