queer play                           Cawthra Park

thrashing, scurrying among rose bushes

missing thorns, oblivious to my guiding calls

suddenly sprinkler  jets jut out into the path

I shout for him to run

to be careful in this stream of prickly stems and unadulterated water spouts

austere columns invite a toddlers  twisting in and out of unintended jungle gyms

memorials flanking one side of the children’s water park and the community centre

he runs his smile wider than parental breadth

grins and thanks me for saving him from the deluge

like wild remembered smiles from those columns – the ghosted names of friends who went too soon

playgrounds bookended by a dearth of generational sway stolen from girls becoming women boys

becoming men, becoming women, becoming men - making way

for the hard won play of new queer youth and all they have to say

grave

an effeminate old man walks by the site

where they laughed at large cysts

on the side of a bald mourners head

burying faces in Nana’s seal coat

tears mistaken for bereavement

when shame from childish laughter

at the unassuming comic matrix of skull and tumor-like ball

covered in breeze swept wisps of graying hair

causes them to cry away their wild childish smiles

the soft sleek touch of a dead animal’s fur on their cheeks

as they flank their grandmother’s comforting arms as she mourns a dead sister

mistaking her grandsons’ masked glee for sadness

later they would lie, side by side in broken twin bunks toppled by the raucous

love for the sinew of their nine year old flesh and bone battling against each other

in soft little fist fights and tight wrestling arms

he taught you how to fold toilet paper in squares saving wasted tissue

for other movements  –  gave you courage in the face of his own masculinity

as it outgrew the lifelong femininity of your fey measured gait - sweet lisp of

strolling in and out of family portraits meant for gendered posterity

both boys among strong women managing men among post war tears

and the hegemonic daze of re-established prowess in a different coat

tiny rebels with unclipped claws  – unaware of the clichés that bound them

to the signifying praxis – the lazy laughter of family plots  where dead relatives lay in waiting

to tell the stories - too  afraid to share tales of other traps and snares

mingling among puzzled thoughts that mix with joy and sorrow

circling cavities containing liquid secretions – growth, blister, vesicle, bleb

pelts collated - conger eel, cuttlefish, coral - pups

in raging juvenilia - hormones leaping - they stood by graves to chuckle, weep, then lie

together aptly plying into adolescence – now he cries for unknown pasts -

there beside that dugout respite

from the playgrounds, rolls of tissue, you still long for shadows

of his stylish manhood – him for your minced swagger - one went out of fashion – flushed

through centuries of bodies laughed at through skin and bone

the sobbing  lyric limbs – limp and wan they warned them not to play with verse

but there they went – hopping skipping jumping into manhood - graveside
having left themselves behind . . .