Justin Goodman
THE MYTH OF THE SUN AND THE MOON
Hypothetically, if I’m my parents only child, I’m peaches wanting to be painted like French girls.
I’m the color of all the fraternities I never joined because of the way men make me feel
like such a good boy. And yes, I’m fetching and full of roll overs, but–
look, parts of me are night chasing the day parts of me. And it’s only a dog’s lifetime back that
testosterone severed my breasts, saying “if you are so fond of this body; eat that too!” It’s grief,
this Baudelaire burlesque where I think You – hypocrite reader – my double – my brother
only to remember I grew up in a family with bowls of wax fruits. I cut my name into a peach to know
what it was like to be born, and when I got older I removed the first letter so I could die.
It’s nothing personal. Just the cover of night, with the older I get the more I believe in night
the way markov chains believe in words: throbbing throbbing throbbing,
an accident born of a million choices. Poems, in the grand scheme, might be equivalent to training
cherry farmers with Hi Ho! Cherry-O. But I’m all out of Eden and have to start farming somewhere.
It’s taken me this long playing dead to realize that, yes, I’m an exquisite cadaver
and nothing at all like a still life.