A History Of Silence

For the man who told me
“I’m going to be a father soon.
Thank God it’s going to be a boy.
If it was a girl,
I’d have to buy me a shotgun
and shoot whoever she brought home.”

THE SHOTGUN SPEAKS

You, sir, are my favorite kind of my beast:
the hunter who has become a cannibal.
The one who knows it is so much easier
to hunt what you have always been,
that flesh is just flesh as long as it runs.
Tell me, what does your daughter smell like?
Does she love as hard as she bites?
Do the catcalls now stick in your throat?
Do you dream of the women
who’ve swallowed you whole?
What do you fear the most:
the mirrors of men she will bring home
or the constant reminder of the daughters
you’ve stalked? Are you still excited by the dark?
The burst, the carcass, purpled thighs:
My darling, where have your hands been?
What weapons would you plant
in a son?

Think of the firefly,
beating its bright pulse.
Think of the firefly
smashed against a child’s arm
because someone promised it would make his wrist glow
and he wanted to keep the light forever.

Think of the first love you ever destroyed
because you’d never known anything like it before,
like seeing your own heartbeat outside of yourself,
a flickering, luminescent miracle -
you wanted to crush it to your skin.

Think of the luster inside you,
that spark that blazed the first time
you bared yourself to another human being, said:
Call me brilliant as the sun,
or ugly as a naked bulb,
I am dangling before you
so you might not stumble.