He asks me to make his ass tight, to give
him more and thicker hair. When he seeks himself
in what gets written, it's to learn
how I see him. He tells me to make him
what he could've been if it weren't for the childhood
Brooklyn gave him when a man held a gun
to his head for a token. So I give him fantasies
no magazine would ever want. They don't have
big breasts, they don't have the hair he said
he wanted: curling, sleek as sex and shining
without even the throw of light upon it.
I make of him a farmer. Brooklyn is what I remove
to make this work. There he never felt the nothing
of a chicken's neck snapping in his hands, never
had a cow turn the earth hollow with its dead drop
into the mouth of the family who shot it.