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The first date I went on I was in 

11th grade and wore a turtleneck to 

The mall 

With a boy who liked going to Valley Forge to reenact civil war stories on weekends

And he didn’t stop talking about himself.

He picked me up in his truck and it smelled like old food

raisins under a seat 

fucking

grease, sweat that had nowhere to go when the windows were up 

and I knew I didn’t want to kiss him in this life.

We sat in lounge chairs at the back of Circuit City and listened to the surround sound of other voices,

that warm wire smell of electronics soothing a hum in me I wasn’t ready to hear. 

He didn’t ask me questions, seemed to know me from the amount of drink he took in gulps of my body,

Made decisions like he grew up owning things because his hands could reach for them. 

His jokes were stupid, exhaustive, raunchy and my cheeks already hurt from pretending to laugh. 

After ice cream that felt like heat in my ears, after the barrel of his chest turning outward

in the food court to be perceived through me,

I pushed past cold too fast, my cone piled too high with cream he watched me lick too close, eyes that ate me like I was just skin with no story.

He insisted on a walk by the bridge behind my house, after. I clung to the splintered wood with my knuckles, listened to the creek, envied how it knew where to flow, kept my hips turned away from him

Until the turn of my head met an aggressive kiss that only knew how to take, to snuff out, to overbear

and it felt less good 

that when the neighbors dog 

licked me in the face last week. 

He was awkward in his posturing, the way I could tell he didn’t spend time around girls or boys, the way   

he made too many jokes he’d probably heard from his father and I thought of his mother’s tired eyes, his room I’d never see, the poems u wrote he didn’t deserve to read.

I looked at the breeze hitting the reeds and grieved for something I didn’t know, felt my chest tunnel and thought of my geometry homework while he calculated his pride.

He smiled after the kiss like the promise of it could pull more weight than a riptide, and asked to be my boyfriend like the ritual was built for him and not me, like acceptance was gratitude and my pockets should be full of it. 

 I remember holding that cannonball of disappointment inside the fist of my heart

As I dashed through a sentence like an olympic skier, explaining I wanted to focus on getting into the right school. 

He turned away scorned like I’d just branded his eyeballs with mercury, then with a glance back that told me “We’ve got time.”

I’d gotten notice of early admission last week and I wondered how many ways I’d have to lie my way around bad jokes, how many moments by bridges I’d have to march through while the battlecry in me screamed for a different war, 

I thought about the wrong kind of boys 

who looked up to gunpowder regimes 

put their seals on everything that didn’t belong to them 

Clicked their tongues and 

Knew they were brilliant without being told

How he looked to watch,

Not see. 

Four years later I let a girl take my shirt off in the basement of her dorm and my fingers found electricity 

While I gripped her hips and filled the hunger in myself with the buttercream of her sighs against my neck. 

I shivered against a brick wall while she kissed me with her hood up in the Winter I learned how

to shiver

from her touch.

A season came where every battle inside felt like a victory from the bullet of her tongue. 

She drew my portrait in candlelight, knew what to say, how to look at me like fever, drove me further with her whispers than any truck could go.

I found streams more often, settled myself on benches with my body open to the sun. I left my sweat on sheets, tulips on doorsteps, perfumed my hair with someone else’s shampoo in a shower stall for one, while I bloomed like a petal around her hand.

I learned to dance, wrote novels with my mouth on their skin, found my wrists in chains that hung behind a lovers bed frame and fell hard for a roller derby girl who skated circles around my clit.

I  found white flags in the shape of legs around my neck, touched God when a girl stole my sunglasses, kissed me outside a bar full of boys who uncomfortably smoked their cigarettes and didn’t have pining chests full of keepsakes to trade for one of her smiles in the moonlight.   

I drank pony-necked beers at pride, kissed someone who gave me a sip of her whiskey when she saw I was shy, saw I was new and a tangled mess of roots that were still learning to be.

I washed off that kiss by the bridge with her pleasure, her war cries in the dark when it was morning and we still hadn’t slept, and my hips burned from how deep I’d fucked her to reach her truth

I didn’t think about clocks, or roads, didn’t think about boys or the hymnals on Sundays that left so much of me bound like a shadow afraid of itself.

I was here, feeling the way music felt on my lap next to theirs, skipping a prayer circle Christmas for a cabin in New York, snow and stars and a deer that ate from my hand and the spoon of them cradling me while their fingers in my mouth fed me flashes of lightning.

I swayed like wildflowers on the edge of water, let myself bend closer to things the sky knew while

the reed of my bones kept reaching. 

I still think about that girl, clutching wood bare-knuckled, locked limbs like a fortress hoping for a key in the shape of someone else’s mouth, my father’s voice on the front of a motorcycle breaking the stained glass of my heart while he casually mentioned conversion therapy on our way to brunch.

I think about my stepmother hiding her head to look through the fridge while my naked toes dug into the kitchen floor asking if my girlfriend could come to dinner and met with the muffle of,

“We know you’re this way but we wish you weren’t.”

Queerness is the streak marks of a car crash that a butterfly lands on

A crack of light that wasn’t meant to find its way in, pushed through violence to be born

It’s the sob that sits in your throat at a club after a girl you dance with goes back to her boyfriend 

It’s also the tidepool of heaven between her thighs

Their fist in your hair on a Tuesday in April that made roses bloom in the dark

Their hand in yours knotted like ropes that hold the lines of fear at bay 

It’s the sinewed fist that grieves to be a hand, 

a crimson pulse that sings in sonnets 

over a jazz of battles 

that don’t need to be.

I will keep fighting like a poem 

Keep stinging sweetly like a monarch 

To clap its wings

While  

I 

float 

through the ceiling 

When she/he/they 

white flag below me

to claw through their ache 

to storm the curves and lines 

Of who I am.

We die like cannons 

In the dark 

We live like war is 

On our back

While we fuck like gunpowder kissing 

Fire.