The Printout (Round 3)
Let’s workshop this poem about adolescent secrecy and shame surrounding sexual exploration at the threshold of multiple taboos, culminating in the shock of exposure by the adult world
The Printout
—for C-Ride, a best friend for life
It was a heart-pounding last-minute scramble—
a dance the barely-teen latchkey knew by heart.
He washed his lather-proof hand (over dishes)
as best he could, his pelvic floor still echoing.
He placed the jar of petroleum jelly (too-bare)
in the medicine cabinet, label faced in (as it was).
He hid the black-tape-bound banana-peel pouch
(a MacGyvered apparatus less spicy in practice)
in his toy chest and then, panged by paranoia,
in the kitchen garbage—greasy and browning.
He ran the dwindled roll of that electrical tape
to the cellar, rocks in its radon walls like eyes.
He buried the skid panties that strapped his face,
just right for deep nostril tokes of the tart patch,
in his mom’s hamper (pausing at a crustier pair).
He pounced to his room upon the muffler scrape
as if engaged in his penny-rolling chore all along,
curtain shadows ghostly on wood-panel walls.
His windows rattled in the wake of the door slam
reverberating through the uninsulated hollows,
unnerving him even though he anticipated it.
But once keys clanged the curbside coffee table,
ear-perking silence thickened in computation
of the find. Smackdab 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 a fierce dread that he had been found out.
Yet by the time he reached the cold 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 shit?!” 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
ogling the line-by-lagged-line load of dialup),
she thrust the gleaming gorgon head (half-balled)
out in his direction (arm’s length), turning him
to stone in the ramshackle threshold, his expiry
dribbling coagulated to black waitress sneakers.This poem is unpublished
Sinnamon Love—>
