About the Feature
I have given you this hunger like a razor blade.
Gods you manhandled for nights
in a tangleweed of chest hair
are nameless & impossible as air in a fist.
Some days it is best to hide your antlers.
Others they are not enough.
*
Spellbind a girl would make your father
proud & your mother
dismember the mothering.
Years: long sirens
of words raked back to ash.
For a dowry I junked history
& slung mud in your name.
You ask me about the wine stains.
I ask you about your teeth.
*
In a moonless mattress of night
I made a boy of you.
In a heaven without hair
the trees strip off their leaves
like an ill-fitting dress.
*
With a mouthful of petals the boys
acted their buck racks & ten points.
History is a family of wifeless nail-biters.
Welcome to heaven where we already know
you’re lying.
*
Unproven foreigner my mouth
is a test you’ve already failed.
What lacks: once you dreamed
an unsimple paradise. If you listen
the junkyard is sirenless.
I’ll make a fake god of you yet.
Will you husband? Boyless as bone.
These my drunken wrists.
These your bloody bandages.
The body is a door left open.
About the Author
Brad Trumpfheller is a poet and undergraduate student at Emerson College. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Nation, West Branch, Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are the internship director for Winter Tangerine.