Joshua Garcia

Wet Dream

It wasn’t until I forgot and then remembered,
until their shapes turned like a room through the bottom of a glass,

that I started to question the way I remember things—
the words I still feel hard against the back of my neck. Two boys

pushed me into a bedroom. I’m unsure how far, the memory marked
only by the doorframe, the coming and the going,

and the smell of rain on a human face.
I’ll never use the word queer to name myself, I said,

unable to discern the virtue of ambiguity. How could I after
hearing the way it spilled from their mouths? (I remember their mouths.)

My tongue passes over each of his pictures with a supplicatory please
until dew breaks across all the lawns on my street. I wonder if

it really was him who Sharpied fag on my locker. How easy
it would be to get swept into the spill. I could wash up on Kiawah Island

colorful as any shell of lilac, vermillion, or slate. But I wrap the Q’s tail
in my hand like a rope and pull myself toward the barrel of it, buoying

in the swell, knocking into it with the lift of each wave until again,
again I am breathed back against the not knowing.

I wake and my hand reaches to check, not for the memory itself
but for what remains.

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Joshua Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston and is an editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hobart, Bodega, Ruminate Magazine and elsewhere.