7.12 / Queer Three

Three Poems

Boycott trinity

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Is it possible to be a man with a friend. To be a man about it. SHE licks my hand and what I give her is thusly sticky. SHE licks my hand and the whole sidewalk falls from the fervor. Man with a friend watches me or is me. My shady pinkness and sexless mystery. The will-it-stain question. Head-on-the-floor-or-ruined-against-the-door question. There is no chance of this but to be a man about it is to stink up anyway, so all parts of me quash the thought.

Now that this man has a friend the whole world is his friend and steppable. If I lay little rocks for her path HE knows they are his as all space is his and all time. All the time I am pleading with her to draw a bath – leave us hanging – be her own woman and a real woman – leave us – but I am that man – with no fingers.

Central to my manhood is separation. Maybe this is how it always is. But being a man means I like to be the unusual of any two. When there are three of us, which there are, yes, always, I impale myself on the triangle’s beautiful tip. Our triangle spins about with my weight and then it’s her turn.

 

Shaved birth trinity

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When is a circle a smoothing

When it is lined in one
where are the parts that decenter it

tip      tip      last tip

Shaved me plots my lives out till they overlap
Shaved HE is a null set, self-sucking

SHE does not want to fit and doesn’t

burn on like broken, hoping us

I posit a circle that would unite all parts
so circulate the literature

stage a new threesome but no one
comes

On the now line SHE says I will never
flub her

HE sips the solid room closed
happy to be here and easing out

HE is my motoring hand while SHE slips
the noose

Knifed me ribbits till I’m smooth again

A bad circle and perfect one
rocks its energy from harder

bone. In a circle where is the home.

 

Shape sifter trinity

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My heart is a triangle. It has been said. But what type. HE is one side and narrow. SHE is a little less stationary. WE are all of us watching the spin. Which way will we drip next. Long sheets of water slack our sides tryingly. Trine, we are a bit thicker. But where does this width lead, to what does it lend its lecher spear. Gross on the floor SHE slips up, calls me Daddy. HE has no such ink or spill, but when our little room rocks oh we are pasty with it. I lace my wishes in such papery tricks that even I cannot tell the sides apart. Apart from this of course there is another shape, one that is not at all triangular. The shape is inside me, stoutly. In its sanded down edges are pieces of pieces. Years flake off in the shape of flakes. Said shape says we could continue and it says we could not. Rounds and bulbs later WE are all of us still and sticky, are all of us still stuck: HIS lever lengthening my compartment, my plumping spoon newly buttered against HER skin. This aside we are mostly thin. And so the nameless shapes grope mopily on, depressed in something lower than mud and muckier. A severer dance I have never severed. That triangle wanted to wear me into weather.


Anne Marie Rooney is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), as well as the chapbooks The Buff (The Cupboard, 2011), and Shell of an egg in an effort (Birds of Lace, forthcoming 2012). She currently lives in New Orleans, where she is a teaching artist.
7.12 / Queer Three

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