​Órexis

                        after jayy dodd  

 

                        “Before nourishment there must be obedience.” - Eduardo C. Corral 

 

I. 

 

                                                                                                                                        i 

 

                                                                                                   -magine narcissus said: 

 

you & me icarus: a corvid tongue’s chorus: desire, a nyx: for bitterlickboys: each

plume, a kiss 

 

grabbed from the skyline’s lip/rind: red as worship: or say: swollenpeaches:

breached, myotome: 

 

my god: wax wings/perhaps: another flyboy’s confession: between hungry light

& the sea, you’re 

 

handsome: reckless affector, i admit: a boy within me is without adequate

language for: beautiful 

 

& glutted enough convenient guilt to trick the mirror: to fall/in love with his

refraction: as if these 

 

weary affectations could carry: a sunken weight sunward: tell me: must we

be/what we are: 

 

fellable fellator: our namesakes, the bluest fiction: arrowed blackbirds

outstretched truly 

 

into myth/vacant water, & martyred: sons of seaglass: sudden prophets of

troubled blood: the 

 

iterations of an idea of love: miracle, reaching: featherweight buoyancy:

eschewing styx at last 

 

like death ain’t become themself without: fracturing mirrors/fractioning light:

our final days’ 

 

appetite: crowning queerness: a consequence: longing: another body’s violence

turned: vivacious 

 

daydream: unquiet dissolution of the humerus: as if: the deviant would not

deny his destiny: & swim.

 

 

 

II. 

 

                   “We don’t want wings. / We want to be fish now.” - Saeed Jones 

 

            When he fell into the water—against his 

father’s desire—a soft thing unsuspected 

had met him. Unwaxed beneath the blueing sun, 

              he became mere wick; 

 

              despite my every bone, I snapped. Undulant 

Mirrorer peering into the bitterlick: 

the boy: cascading through the cracks. 

               I cannot say if 

 

              his brinebone opened me, gills at the wrist 

but O how the black boys learned to swim—swell 

as two bodies bloated with providence, we 

              learned to undo our 

 

              Undoing. Coined our myths to huck across Styx 

River—wet tongues pursed upon each other’s lips 

Narcissus. Icarus. Narcissus. Icar- 

              Us. Unfettered we 

 

              straddle prophetic tragedy, suckle azure 

deviance until salt dissolves the doomspell 

incanted upon the labyrinthine reef 

              of our becoming.