Aaron Deutsch

Psyche Pumps Some Iron

He flaunts at the gym booty shorts
and crop-top tees—stomach smooth,
tight as the skin of a bubble.
In his earbuds, Simone De Beauvoir
lectures on freedom. Cool prose
while he lifts. Lunges
among metallic clatter. Thud
of heavy plates.

Dull hulks with bodies like shelters of muscle
braided with living veins, circle squat racks
like dogs guard meat. Grunting
as they press high above them
the weight of a show pony. 

Psyche folds himself into downward dog,
slick as a high-gloss centerfold.
Pistons his plum thighs
barely stippled with blonde hairs.    

Yet, no one seems to notice
the number of repetitions.
Any of the laps he takes
‘round the red running track
worn to patches of smooth gray.
His strides longer and smoother
than anything in the Serengeti. 

They’d much rather discuss
the attributes of chalk.
Count out grams of protein.
Shake violently the plastic
vessels they’ve prefilled with creatine.

Dank, unmistakable lust
inflames Psyche’s toxic fantasy;
Every jacked man
in spitting distance
salivating over the warm slope
of his sculptural buttocks.
Man more woman than them—
liminal as ghost or solstice.
Oh, how these brutes light up
boring into his
bald geography
down to the rich, dark seam of soil.
Tucking him, like a piece of stolen opal,
against rough hide. 

Twilight sets in. Time for mere mortals
to strip away gloves and guards.
To think of home. Grab for gym towels
to wipe against the hot kitchens
of their clammy necks. Psyche,
the dumb bell, still pistoning.
Idly ringing in his own ears. Lovesick
on the blunt odor of iron and sweat.

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Aaron Deutsch received his MFA with distinction from Texas State University. His work appears in The Atlanta Review, Scalawag Magazine, The Ilanot Review and was a finalist for the 2019 Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry. His work also appears in the anthologies Thirty Poems for the Tricentennial: A Poetic Legacy and Closet Cases. His writing, heavily inspired by his love for the southern gothic, holds space for homonormativity in heteronormative spaces and lifts the mundane into the sacred. Aaron is particularly interested in threading the needle between lyric and narrative, vulgar and vulnerable, shame and pride.