Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
after Richard Siken

A man walks into a bar and says he wants to be a man. So he is.

A man walks into a bar and says      you are my beloved, let me show you
             the life we built   but you do not recognize him
                                                                                                  as a man—
             so you take his soft jaw in your palm       and he waits
                         for the punchline.

A man walks into a bar and looks like your lover, but he is
             not your lover,      so you have another drink.

A man walks in terrified of men, not sure he is one, and you want
             to take him home because he is your lover,    to strip him
                                        throat to groin, but it’s not what you imagined,

                         so instead he traces the outlines of bodies,
traces the shape he wants to be.

I’ll tell you everything, he says, I’ll turn the lights off. We can pretend
we’ve only just met. I would build a life with you in the drought. Let me
             put my body on the line for love.

                         I would do it all over again, be in that cold room, turning the heat
                         between our bodies, turning the car home.        Let it happen,

             say goodnight, say you’ll love the new shape I’ll leave in the outline
                         of light.

 

 

 

Please mark all scars on your body

 

I.
Nightsilk red. I harvest the platelets, spooling
IV.
Compulsion; a pull on the spine. I find myself

 
ribbon drudged through mud. From dreogan, to
 
in the grocery aisle, on the way home, the box

 
work; to suffer. To spend eight hours a day, to
 
of blades in my hands, the metalsmooth sheen.

 
clock in to the body, a hard day’s work, a long
 
Zwangneurose, from twank, to squeeze; press;

 
way home. I close my eyes on the drive, just to
 
pressure. I call to say I’ve relapsed, to press the

 
see.
 
wound open, to flay the muscle, a marbled

 
 
 
white.

II.
A litmus test. From lita, to dye; to stain. A drop
 
 

 
of it, blooming, mouthsplit wet and warm. The
V.
Now, here, finally. A bird in the hand. A stone

 
flinch of it all, like clenching your teeth over and
 
in the palm. Hands damp with raspberry bush.

 
over again, to draw the inside out. I came here
 
I tear the skin with bonedull teeth, when it

 
to explain where my mind goes when I lay down
 
closes, a scar. Eskhara, a hearth. A welcome

 
in the middle of the street on the way home.
 
home.

 
 
 
 

III.
All I know is breath; practice of keeping steady
 
 

 
an oar breaking the surface of a winedark sea. I
 
 

 
sharpen the rounded edge—martyr, pislarvattr,
 
 

 
torture witness; sadisme, lover of cruelty, named
 
 

 
for the libertine Sade.
 
 

 


bennett joan nieberg (they/them) is a queer Jewish poet pursuing their MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. They are a Pushcart Prize nominee and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Magazine, Entropy, Western Humanities Review, The Indianapolis Review, and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. They are the editor in chief of the journal What Are Birds?