Gay Sestina

What happened is what happens to any upper-middle class transexual—

the sky’s abortifacient blue a retrospect on false wombs and useless hope,

leaning on the grimy rudimentary skater-boy feeding tokens to a Simpsons pinball game.

The wind possessed the chalky metallic sweetness of a nearly unaffordable medication.

It was the summer the gays were gay and the lesbians were unbelievable,

bickering in baroque promenades about the androlinguistics of saying you’re “in love.”

And of course, according to our dogs and parents, we did actually seem to be in love,

the byzantine choreography of wiping dried lube from the femur of a 
transexual,

the rainbow sky acid-raining on the FurCon-goers mingling in the unbelievable

open-air limerence—baffling to the pansexuals who had thrived somehow without hope.

A dungeon master ducks into the tea garden to swallow dice like medication.

A girl survives her apocalypse evening, invoking the ludic refuge of a party game,

scars striated like axles on an abacus for which counting is the lone, insipid game.

After interior decades, one forgets the gossipy panacea of you-and-me love;

a girl becomes a girl on ocean air, spare keys lodged in boxwood leaves, blue medication.

She wonders if—and if so, for what pleasure or purpose—God knows she’s a transexual.

Rooms of deferred lovebirds drink Aperol rosewaters to postpone talks of hope,

a man in love with a thing hisses under his breath, “fucking unbelievable.”

It’s been years since anything on Earth was truly unbelievable.

You and I, soft asymptotic queers, clasp hands like in a polygonal video game,

pixels clipping in some prismatic simile for real-life, coalescent hope.

In each life, there’s the first instance one concedes to insane and insufficient love,

particle becoming wave—except for the hurtling, ever-particularized transexual.

The doctor, a handsome married father, inquires into the efficacy of your medication.

Well, I’m deadly tired, too tired to be reconfigured in new museums by a medication.

I shall detransition into a shadow, those dim pellucid mimics of the 
unbelievable.

What did I gain—sans herpes and beatific lucidity—from being a transexual?

The pamphleted rules to some dusty, cupboard-shut, eternal board game

about how to become euphoric without an iota of that fragile folklore, love.

Five years later you recall, as through a shattered water-logged 
kaleidoscope, hope—

motility in the city, girls on iridescent concrete, mirrors fractaling open into hope.

You’re not above survival thanks to some controlled, non-addictive medication.

Atriums of gays, dyke bars, strip mall boulangeries, the frugal muted weathers of love.

That any of us are living—or even dead—is still somewhat unbelievable,

gnawing on each other’s ruddy nubs like some jerky, winter-cured game.

I would give up everything to be a melancholy, radiant transexual.

On crisis days, I hope for the quick celestial arrival of the unbelievable.

In scented rooms, I count my medication like a life-affirming, estrogenic game.

All of us are in flaming, flagrant love with a kneeling, on-fire transexual.