Self Portrait as a Queer Block Party

Your fat spills brown across the moonlit crown of grass.

Your soulmates, are a golden gaggle of fish, shoaling thick,

until you are schooled enough in this love.

The hours left before sunrise are a prism of scales, marked

for the net, long-cast // before you learned time had an end //

Bodies so true, joy pools behind the ears & around the clavicles

like jewels. Like shimmering jewels. Pores chant in the street:

we are alive. Speakers blast the indigo sky like firecrackers

in June. You take the first hand, then hip, with you through the dance,

glide, until you find the body you abandoned // measurements ago //

You travel it with your partner. Their unshaved armpits, bleached

seaweed green. Their bare midriff, an amber thicket. Their lilac robe, a

protection, against the binary of day or night. An inch of umber belly

leaps beyond your shirt, like a flying fish in silver light.