The Printout

Let's workshop this poem

For an updated version, see: https://maistvanjr.substack.com/p/the-printout-round-2

The Printout

It was a heart-pounding last-minute scramble 
with which the young boy was well familiar. 
He washed his waterproof hand (over dishes) 
as best he could, his pelvic floor still echoing.
He placed the too-bare jar of petroleum jelly
in the medicine cabinet, label turned as it was. 
He hid the electric-tape-bound banana sleeve
in his toy chest and then, panged by paranoia,
in the kitchen garbage—greasy and browning. 
He ran the dwindled roll of that black tape
to the basement, rocks in its walls like eyes.
He buried the panties that strapped his face, 
just right for nostril tokes of the tart patch,
in his mom’s hamper (spotting a better pair).
He shot to his room upon the muffler scrape
as if busy at his penny-rolling chore all along,
curtain shadows ghostly on wood-panel walls. 

His windows rattled from the slam of the door
reverberating through uninsulated hollows,
startling him even though he anticipated it.
But after keys clattered on the coffee table,
ear-perking silence thickened in computation
of the find. Right on the living room carpet,
in the traffic-worn path, lay an inkjet image—
washed out from a cartridge low on black,
too yellow from an empty cyan—pixilated
on printer paper: black thighs, spread-eagle,
onto which the hyperventilating marauder
in his mask had moments before, squatting 
in ache, pumped out a diaphanous payload,
chlorine pool in odor (“All over you, Bitch”).

“What the fuck is this?!” his mom shrieked. 
He surged up from the pennies, possessed 
by fierce dread that he had been found out. 
Yet by the time he reached for the doorknob, 
confident there was no way he failed to cover
every taboo track, he found himself possessed 
more so by a twisted curiosity to learn, that if
by some crazy chance he had been found out, 
what damning detail he could have missed. 

“What—the fuck—is this?!” she shrieked.
Clutching the printout in a fist that gobbled
the pan-African-hued header “Nubian Slut” 
(pussy-ink-robbing red-black-green nutted to
during the line-by-lagged-line load of dialup),
she thrust the gleaming gorgon head out 
in his direction (arm’s length), turning him 
to stone there in the threshold, his expiry 
dribbling coagulated to her waitress feet.

* “The Printout” originally appeared in Literary Orphans (2015)

Photo Credit: unsplash.com/@planeteelevene