08-30-2022

 

Tory Adkisson

​

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH MY EIDOLON

 

All I know is how to shiver.

I was born in rain and continue to live there.

I want to believe when you say

it’s warm and I can’t feel it. Belief is a word that rests

cold and heavy on my tongue.

If, someday, it evaporates, I will relinquish

time as just another figure to measure

my existence along with my height, weight, waist,

and dick size. Men are very particular

about these things. When the seasons change

so do I, signaling you with a cuttlefish’s

war paint, the undulation of color on my skin

hypnotizing you into a long sleep

you might never wake up from. I’m not so cruel.

Some days I want to know your cloudless

world, the soft sighs in every stanza of your palms.

Some days I want to wrestle

an angel to the ground just so he can know

its flavor. I see in you a childhood

full of dust devils, a country with my name.

I see in you a place to mouth

dumb questions to a god that doesn’t have

words enough to answer.

 

THE FAUN

 

Some nights it came

with long, unmanageable hair

on staggered footfalls,

 

its breath spiked with whiskey,

a pair of ravenous hands

forever willing to bless my neck

 

and thighs with bruises

shaped like cat’s eyes. Its hands

didn’t know the meaning of kindness—

 

it would watch me sleep for hours

before peeling back the rind

from my softest parts to pierce them

 

with its tongue, masturbating me

until it grew so titillated its tall

horns scraped bits of stucco off the ceiling.

 

Only then could I draw its thistle

flute into the smallness of my mouth

and play the only song I knew

 

that would make it go away,

a shrill whistle like an animal call,

the sound of one heart closing as another

 

opens, drawing darkness in

with each beat. It was like that:

a cruel song, but sweet.

 

ODE TO SNEAKERS

                   Cleveland, Ohio

 

arranged in a pile, stinking like wildflowers,

used gym socks protruding

 

from their mouths like stamen.

Why is the stink of bacteria so alluring to me?

 

The accumulation of single cells in a dark,

damp sole, the minutiae of Adidas, Chucks,

 

& Nikes lying on the floor

with mute tongues. This is my secret

 

that stops being a secret

when I write it. There are four guys

 

living here, around twenty or twenty-five pairs

between them. Upstairs I hear them snoring,

 

masturbating, watching old war movies

while I lean low & lift a shoe to my nose

 

to inhale its bitter acid. I’m breathing in

a chronicle of the day’s many male

 

labors—running track, basketball, P90X—

with closed eyes, aware that this metonymy

 

can’t draw me to a field, or us any

closer, than taste or touch might.

 

It’s too dark. Too difficult to grasp anything beyond

myself—& even then, being invisible is exciting.

 

Just listening is exciting. Above me

thunder rolls, mattresses squeak, bombs

 

are going off. Down here, I’m face down in the chasm

between shame & denial, my erection

 

a bridge to a better, more sensual world.

​

-from The Flesh Between Us (SIU Press 2021), selected by Fall 2022 Guest Editor, Michael Walsh 

​

Tory Adkisson is the author of The Flesh Between Us (SIU Press 2021), winner of the Crab Orchard Series Open Book Competition. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Third Coast, Crazyhorse, Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland and teaches writing at UC Berkeley.