The podcast host asks “When did you realize you’re queer?”
but no age counts the same
knuckles, wrinkles and twinks, ear and armpit hairs,
orthopedic aches the real daddy,
time kudzuing reason, premature efforts to fit in
and feel good when feeling different
is always the first queer feeling. “What was the thing
that made you go Oohhhh?”
My queer took root in the white lycra typography
of an Obsession ad speedo,
any episode of Entertainment Tonight, the hoop earring
Prince sported to Dick Clark’s dismay,
dangling like a wormhole I’d burrow through time
to where my queer is all at once
and always unruly, unclear until another man reciprocates,
until the slowdown an erection induces
extends into... “I don’t know,” I say. “Probably watching
Magnum P.I. and Dukes of Hazzard,”
the camera pulling my eye to their Caravaggio flesh,
tight pants and taut waists
inviting introspection. The producer says metrics plummet
if the answers are boring,
“but Tom Selleck’s thighs will always do nicely.” They edit
my answers for triple snaps, wolf howls,
a laugh track, giving my stories more time to myth me,
to swell and bukkake more ears
with energy so queer it feels forever like creation,
stars over and over, exploding.
Ben Kline (he/him/his) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles, host of Poetry Afield and Poetry Stacked, Ben is a poet and storyteller whose work appears in bedfellows magazine, Pangyrus Lit, South Carolina Review, Pigeon Pages, Poetry, Southeast Review, Autofocus, fourteen poems, and many other publications.
