How the Plenipotentiary Solved Things
Years later,
I imagine the boys
now as lanky as mostly grown colts
meet,
at college.
You know how these things go. Scholarships. Strong biology programs.
They will haul liquor store boxes
to the dorm room they were assigned to by lottery
(our families, also, we are assigned to by chance).
And after all the mattress pads and whiteboards,
after one family takes home an extra hotplate,
my boys will lie sweaty on their individual beds.
My family pulled me out
of elementary school,
one says.
Me too,
says the other.
I don’t even know.
Something about the gays.
My mom says, says all the time
they look just like everyone else, you know.
( and the other thinks about his own gays, his father’s inability to can tomatoes properly, his other father’s worries about botulism, as they all sit down to marinara sauce. and his own gender,
which others understand as primarily piles of paperwork,
and he understands to be as simple as a poem,
a river.)
Yes,
he says,
they do.
