I find myself within the curvature of the crossroads,
all this holy honey-dewed skin and
resonance within my bones,
she looks so beautiful,
bathed in shades of stained-glass epiphanies.

Soft and sun-touched,
I marvel at the gentleness of
falling
into queerness, into the
shade of a bulwark.

There’s a softness to the gentle ripple of the waves,
of being hand in hand,
of music and laughter and
unwinding the rosary from around her throat,
from around my throat,
where purity melts away

Joy looks like freedom,
Joy looks like the other side

But there was a time
when I lost myself in the eroded crust of the crossroads,
and the bottoms of my feet were deep in the gravel of it all,
knees meeting faux leather and
hands pressed to each other in prayer,
beckoning gravity with
sticky, guilty skin.
Watching the man on the cross who
died for you, died for this sin.

I’m goddamn lost,
I said, in the confessional booth of
only my young, darkened room, where all the
monsters are all my own instead of nailed
to the wall.

I grow, those monsters inside unfurling like wings,
like love, like the tenderness of being
known.

Brick by careful brick, building oneself up,
up, up, I reach for the sky, and by that I
really mean that I’m reaching for her,
for the love which beckons to dig teeth into
opposition, until

we find ourselves together, at the end of what had once
been a crossroads but is now just
soulmates at the edge of the universe.