Aubade with Bottom Envy by Aidan Forster


& suddenly, it is like all the quiet Sundays of my childhood.

Trouble, low in the bulrush, dons its little fey crown.

Boys enter habits—cigarettes or their pilfering—& I enter entering—exeunt, a-lush, exeunt.

Haspless, by degrees, & roughly quartered, boyhood’s smiley hive collapses around me.

Beautiful things in every category—barrettes, especially—remind me of my possible self.

Call me silicone. Call me 5% benzocaine. Call me alkyl nitrate.

Like Trojan women, men call me: Relax, my doom-bound-doom. Your first time?

Whiff figment of never having enough of what it takes to take enough of what I want.

O craven seawall, O sour crest—fucked, on a ceramic toadstool, for boutique Maker’s Mark.

After, in my blood’s magellanic fit, always a different bauble.

The bald theorist introduces the devil’s dick—a frozen tube of sperm—charts its melt.

My hole, my golem, my nacre grasp—in you, time dawdles, my plaything.

I search amateur pornography for refusal’s pithy glut.

I search amateur pornography for two twinks in tweed, reading Proust aloud.

I search amateur pornography for professional advice on what to do if not get fucked.

In my Aesopian future, I’m reborn as the only living hole in the galaxy.

I confound science—no one knows what to do with all this texture.

With icy and planetary precision, mothers pin enamel miniatures of my holeness to clean lapels.

Men imagine me as a glorious & glimmering helix in which they draw closer to themselves.

All that will survive of me is a single devious sound.

The kiss of the world unburying itself, already, inside me.

 

Aidan Forster is a queer, non-binary writer from Greenville, South Carolina. They are the author of the chapbooks Exit Pastoral (YesYes Books) and Wrong June (Honeysuckle Press). Their work appears in or is forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2017, Cherry Tree, The Rumpus, Teen Vogue, and Tin House, among others. A graduate of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities’ creative writing program, they study Literary Arts and Public Health at Brown University.