Good Boys

By MEGAN FERNANDES

Once in a car, a good boy
shook me hard. If you like it
that way in bed, then why are you…
the tiny bruises on my arms
where his prints pressed into my pink
sleeves rose to the surface like rattles.
Like requests. They thrived there
for a week until they settled
into a wet blackness.
A bruise can sweeten your blood,
can bloom the sweetness into you.
A bruise can bloom rabbits like pines.
Once in a car, everything between us
started growing. And then I was not
in the car or the state
or the east coast anymore.
I was at the summit of a prayer
reeling from an animal mouth,
my tongue an unseeable act,
because, here is the truth:
Even the good boys
want to shake you down, want to come
in your mouth and hair, want to quake
above you if only
for a moment. Come home.
Come home, another good boy says.
I would never shake you. I would never
do anything to your body.

 

[Purchase Issue 13 here]

Megan Fernandes has work published or forthcoming in Rattle, Guernica, PANK, The Denver Quarterly, The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among many others. Her book, The Kingdom and After, was published in 2015. She is an assistant professor of English at Lafayette College and lives in New York City.

Good Boys

Related Posts

overgrown cemetary

March 2023 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

RICHARD MICHELSON
It was essential, Einstein stated, that he bring his violin / to Berta Fanta’s salon on Prague’s Old Town Square. / It is 1912, four years until Relativity, and six before / the first wave of the Spanish flu / will kill, among the / 500 million infected, the painter, Egon Schiele

Image of a foggy evergreen forest

Evergreen

KEI LIM
At the tip of the mountain where / we scattered your ashes, then hers, / your father holds me / for the first time since I changed my name. / He gives me his old pocket knife— / the one meant for you with the hemlock handle.

an image of train tracks, seen through a window. reflection is faintly seen

Addis Ababa Beté

ABIGAIL MENGESHA
Steel kicks in this belly. // Girls with threadbare braids / weave between motor beasts and cement bags. // Tin roofs give way to glass columns. / Stretching as if to pet the clouds. // In the corners: cafés. // Where macchiatos are served / with a side of newspapers.