Let us cast lots

I hate rich people,
my son says, spat
from the belly of the bus
that each day returns him
to dry land, drenched in digestive
juices, as Jonah was vomited
at the feet of God.

I don’t tell him they taste good
with tartar sauce and lime —
he’ll find that on his own
soon enough.

First — he’ll fill his mouth
with hyssop buds, eat his share
of gristle, pick basil seeds
from his teeth.

He will swap his right hand
for his left, hem his toes
with shopping bags
that this winter’s boots might
be next winter’s, too.

How long until he meets
the worm gnawing my
climbing gourd body?

(God made the plant, God made
the worm, God made
the fish, God made
the sweat in my son’s eyes.)

How many days left
to shade his sunburnt head,
to becalm his sleepless sails
against a torrid east wind?

Can’t we have a lesbian love story where no one dies?

i.

In the 1865 novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, Mary Mapes Dodge pens the tale of a Dutch boy who saves his country by plugging up a leaky dyke. The boy keeps his finger in the hole all night.

ii.

My love has walked into the river, pockets full of stones.

iii.

In 1893, John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley publish a book of English slang. Among the synonyms for ‘the female pubic hair’ are bearskin, belly-thicket, Cupid’s Arbour, front doormat, fur-below, grove of eglantine, and hedge on the dyke.

iv.

My love has swallowed all the gas, hose dangling from the pipe.

v.

In the 1921 volume of Medical Review of Reviews, Dr. Perry M. Lichtenstein, describing his examination of a reformatory prisoner to determine her sanity, notes her practice of ‘bull diking’ — She then jumped into the bed and lifting the other’s clothes had intercourse with her by friction of the clitoris. After that morning the practice was continued with regularity.

vi.

My love has flung herself off Leucadian cliffs, greedy surf below.

vii.

Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay publishes Home to Harlem in 1928, in which the character Jake hums a song: ‘And there is two things in Harlem I don’t understan’ / It is a bulldyking woman and a faggoty man…’

viii.

My love has fallen on her knife, heart empty in the street.

ix.

The term ‘bull’ for untrue nonsense — bullshit — crossed the Atlantic with American troops returning from World War I, from the Old French ‘bole,’ or ‘deception.’ A dick is a dick, whether dick or dike or dyke, except when it’s not. A false cock, a dishonest prick, a phony shaft, an erroneous pecker, a fraudulent tool, a misleading phallus. We’ve been killed for less.

x.

My love has broken through the glass, seven stories to the ground.

xi.

now muddy waters ravish shore
the sea will not abide

no dykes remain to hold the flood
taken with the tide

February 9, 2025