JaMES ALLEN HALL

INTRODUCTION FROM SEAN MURPHY

How to be a literary citizen? There’s no single definition or way to be part of the community, but one way I’d recommend is letting a writer know when you appreciate their work. I’m in the habit, and it’s one I recommend, of not hesitating to drop a quick line of gratitude when I come across a piece of work that improves my life. (I also recommend subscribing to Poetry Daily, curated by my awesome alma mater George Mason University.)

POEMS

The Saw

Museo de la Tortura, Toledo, Spain

Someone heated the iron, cut one side jagged. A man

hoisted the criminal up. Angled

the saw at his scrotum. Criminal, because he followed

a plainclothes soldier home,

kissed him open-eyed, saw night shredded down

to morning, saw too late

in his lover’s closet the uniforms, legs halved by hanging.

The prayer to bless the saw

is beautiful. Sierra: my lover corrects my tongue

as we stand in the museum,

our hands pressed against the stained glass of the wrong

century. Steel pig masks stare back

beside the wrack, the maiden, the ghostly pontiff hoods,

eyeing my wrists. Last night I was

suspect, he the guard tying me down, turning me from witness

into tool, body hammered into new

use. How easily its pliancy the flesh forgets. It took me hours

before I could re-enter myself.

The sharpness perforating me. Today I am following the man

as if he is my home. I let him

shut me inside the iron maiden because I want to know

the interior history of pain,

to love the force in the world that wants me torn apart.

On Dark Days, I Imagine My Parents’ Wedding Video

My mother, Anita Bryant, waves to the cameras

without looking at the men behind them, her chastity

intact, unassailable as her perfect coiffure, dark

as coffee, the white saucer of her face. The news

conference is a whirl of men, microphones. Save

the Children blaring on a banner behind her.

I am waiting to be born, a child unlike others,

one my mother would not save. The reporters’

blazers are plaid, unbuttoned; he’s disguised

like them, the man approaching the dais,

my father. I love my mother, innocent, smiling

at the softball questions, I like the hiding in plain

sight that the man and the Anita are doing

before they become my parents. I like knowing

more than the camera. And here is the moment,

their kiss: the man slaps a pie square in Anita’s face.

She hadn’t seen him coming. She was saying,

What they want is the right to propose to our children

that theirs is an acceptable life. Then it’s time for cake.

I like his hate which hates her back. She is my mother

because she says, At least it’s a fruit pie, then begins

to sob. I like watching her dissolve,

thirty years ago now, my father dead, buried,

and no one remembers his name.

Please Enjoy These Coming Attractions

A friend keeps writing about the little blue pills,

every poem a time bomb he plants inside his body.

My little brother says he knows how he’ll end it too:

plastic bag over his head, cinched with rubber bands.

A lover said he loaded the gun once, clicked the safety

off, held it to his head. The barrel left a surprised O

at his temple for a day. My former teacher crushes crystals,

dirty gray, in a bowl, then holds them in his palm,

the charred remains of pleasure. The college freshman

shows me the delicate x’s the X-Acto made, crossing

his blue veins at sixteen. Chris hanged himself

on a closet door with hotel towels on vacation in Peru.

Every gay man inhabiting my students’ short stories

crossed out by AIDS or hate crime. Is it any wonder

I have failed to imagine my life won’t end

in autopsy? Hey, straight reader.

Spin this loaded gun between us.

Let’s see whose life it chooses.

Early English History

Was too early: 8am Tuesday/Thursday, Elizabeth Hall.

I slouched half-asleep, first-rowed, demarcated

from the frat boys sitting in back so they could see

up the professor’s skirt. In the mead hall after,

they surrounded, let me close if I shared my notes.

I was in love with the black-haired outfielder,

his backwards Braves cap, until he called me fag

for refusing to rate our teacher’s underwear.

I didn’t know how to fight back. I learned that semester

about the rebel queen Boudica, whose revolt razed

three Roman forts and the emperor’s temple.

Tacitus provides motive: her husband dead, kingdom

annexed, Boudica flogged, her daughters raped.

The armies she led tortured its captives

but he doesn’t say why. Some pain is negligible;

its survival cancels the wound of its birth.

Most accounts say she poisoned herself,

facing defeat. Cassius Dio gives her longer:

secreted away to the south, living unrecorded

for years with her daughters. The boys in my class

drew stick figures fucking on the wall by my room

after I came out. I woke at night to wash out

the crooked glyphs, the caption proclaiming

“AIDES kills faggs dead.” I scrubbed until

what remained was fist-sized, vague and pink,

a map of the possible world. Our final project

was to cook an authentic English banquet,

eaten family-style at the professor’s house.

At the appointed time in the year of our lord,

I came with dessert but did not see the moat

she’d installed in her foyer. The strawberry pudding

flew like an arrow, pink spurting everywhere,

especially across the faces of those boys whose names

were lost the moment I joined an insurrection

begun in AD 61 by a dissident queen. In the years

since my disappearance, I have cemented

my escarpments, foddered my canon, sewn up

my flag. I am painting my face, bluing my body

with woad. Warn them. I am coming

to punish my Romans.

Romantic Comedy

Enchanted, 2007

Goddamn the snow that sent me into the theater

for two hours’ refuge in projected light. Even if

I only wanted escape, goddamn my wanting.

Goddamn the romantic comedy, a genre pockmarked

by selves who never fulfill themselves. Goddamn

the men like me, holding hands next to me in the dark,

their snippets of growl gilding the film, their delight

at the comic heroine’s transformation from cartoon

to flesh. She falls from Technicolor to Times Square,

rising from the underground in her marriage gown.

Goddamn her flawless skin, her eyes rinsed red,

waking in a drainpipe at the beginning of a soured century.

And then, God, after the movie’s over and I’ve been flung

into another city’s sprawl, after I’ve been released

from the fold forlorn, damn the bride emerging

from the Renaissance Hotel across the salted avenue,

a vision in an unsullied dress. Goddamn the fabric

so luminous in the portrait, looming from its frame,

filling us with longing to bite it into shreds. Goddamn,

what’s wrong with me? I can’t stop thinking about the fairytale

princess, her optimism a perfumed wind in a flagging sail.

As if no one is shipwrecked on the shores of Love

Always Fails Us. The groom is whispering, Goddamn

you’re wet in the hotel laundry to a bridesmaid

whose white fur wrap is a strip of fallen weather

on the cement floor. Goddamn all beauty made in betrayal.

Goddamn the bride, she wants to live the heroine’s life,

all shivering lip and beaded veil, goddamn her

until she is weeping, the cartoon fool. The goddamn concierge

opens the car door for her, bending elegantly

at the waist to palm her dress into the limousine.

He fingers the slight hem. Goddamn him, showing us

what he could do to skin on the belly, skin on the thigh,

my untouched cheek. Goddamn the wind, it isn’t the hand

of a lover. Goddamn the wineglass shattering inexplicably

at the best man’s toast. The best men, the worst men, the extras

in the movie which brought me to tears—goddamn them

and the gift of my body. Goddamn the land and the air,

the fish and the fowl, the light in the day and the night

in the night. But do not damn the lit cigarette I’m holding

too close to my face. Not it, God. Though it burns acrid

between my fingers, it does not leave me alone to lift

my face up out of the halo of darkness, in the cold of Chicago.

Website:   jamesallenhall.com
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