(warning for suicide reference)

you are in the first days
of fourteen, and the only altar in your locker
is to anime
boys whose clothes you want to embody.

the boys you hang
around are altered facades,
and the girls
are “in the locker.”

(no middle schooler is out in 2005, are you crazy?
the only gays
are Sailors Neptune and Uranus,
slashed
out of existence,
out of courtship and
into cousinship.)

you aren’t sly enough
to realize you should take offense
when someone asks you about it,
not sharp enough to wear
a peachfuzz beard like the other
kids all laced together.

but what matters is the weights in your hearts
make magnetism,
make black holes,
silent and secret on the whole of the black sky,
unmarked, no constellation, just pull and radiation only each of you can bear.

that weight puts you all at the same lunch table

where you pull sandwiches from fog-aged Tupperware,
and no one has suggested in years that you and your best friend are in love
since that ire is now a spike leveled
at two boys you will regret not smiling at more,
one of whom will live less than ten more years.

(you’ll be excused for the funeral
and love
how your professor looks at you in pity when you say,
“former classmate”
because you’ll need that pity in your heart,
which was never big enough,
never black hole enough,
but you’ll go walking with Spring Awakening
in those days when there are more queers and more dead.)