‘I love you,’ the boy will tell them. The trees do not move. Erotic, erratic, ‘I love you’s.’ The trees do not move. Don’t you find pleasure in my company, also? Can you not return my affection in kind?

2025, itching for a European summer. Wouldn’t let anyone else approach. Kept everything to promising smiles and soft bellies in boxers. Perverted. Outlandish. Multiple sights locked onto the back of his neck. ‘Boo!’ before firing. Absconding before the pistol’s climax, running over water but he is not Isa (as). Wide eyes and fantastical grinning. Dripping with clotted remembrance streaked across his chin.

Prodigal son comes loping back. Squarish buildings, once housing a comfortable undergraduate study, twisting into nightmare fuel. Darting through academic settings and running into broad-shouldered men who say hello, disappear forever. Scared of something that can’t be understood. Who killed who while I was away? Raised high above everyone else. Dubbed a saint / the perfect bait for bigger game. Lures out a bigger target—put down, calls her a doe-eyed predator—gets sprayed with ropes of blood.

‘You really should stop thinking about it.’ Shot, skinned. ‘It’s a shame, not living up to what we thought you were.’ Blood, sprayed again. Ropes and ropes. Won’t pick up the knife. Loses his mind.

Memories of a bar downtown, early September. Dancing until sunrise. Sweat running down salty backs, pressed against other queers under flashing strobe lights. Not intoxicated, but feeling free, licking lips. A butch palming her girl in the background. Trying and failing to ignore it when they’re sucking on each other’s fingers. Giggling like a prude. The bass drops. They orgasm to the beat.

Nightlife isn’t the same in his hometown. There’s nowhere to dance sober without running into defense contractors. Doesn’t want other girls to inch closer. They won’t get far, but they’ll try all the same. A band on a left ring finger only works so well when a woman is used to carving through concrete, bursting dams for her sexual demand. So he stays home. Reads all the books he’s been avoiding. Only goes dancing in the shower, eyes shut, hot water trickling into his heart.

Sickness creeps in. Chronic Wasting Disease. Zombie deer. Covid. Kafkaesque and Lovecraftian. Antlers shrivel up, fall away. She pulls him out, asks what good his stubbornness is if he up and dies. Cartilage, nerves, fibrous tissue. Little nubs poke through the sides of his head. He lives.

Dreary weather and the final lurch over the finish line. Anthropology, seminars, one paper after another. Saving the world with his analyses. Fixing the academy with bricks cushioned by rubber bumpers. Baby-proofed. He writes about stag girls and fawn boys who have deer bodies and human heads and vice versa. Graduates cum laude but stays home. Celebrates with his cat. No one else. Lets the summer slither in with the death of spring, rotting and humid. The carcass he’s been trying to throw out the trunk rolls out onto the freeway one day.

No longer anyone’s prized possession. The Secretary, ‘guys, be cultured, it’s called Secretary.’ Early 2000s movie magic. Maggie Gyllenhall, getting spanked on the ass. James Spader, the sadistic lawyer who wants to fuck her. Vaguely into BDSM. This movie, he understands it now. Reads up on how there is nothing wrong with him. It’s not about forcefully being caught in a snare. He wants to feel safe enough to let one hoof snag. Knowing he is sniped because it is his choice. His empowerment. He’s turned on by the horror. Fear. Panic when it’s worked for, the way it is in video games. Resident Evil fans are horny for a reason. Biohazard. Wailing for mercy until he pauses the walkthrough. Presses his face into a fresh pillow. Wet spots require a laundry change.

Culminates the night after a work party, driving home after hours spent learning how to socialize via the neurotypical method. Dressed in the hide of his peers. Soft black hair curling around his ears. Small hands and a scarf patterned with horses choking his throat. Driving. Moaning. Reality and his symbolism collide. Kissing with scraping teeth. Barely making it home in time before he has to rip his striped leather jacket from his shoulders. Gets down on all fours. Fur cracking through the skin.

Werewolves probably have a better time turning. He throws his head back, jaws snapping open to release a scream. Imagines a real European summer. This time, all the white splotches would be shorn off. Hiking boots stepping forward. He’d only let her, one pair. Blood pouring from the mouth. Saltburn and dance floor murder parties click through a mental viewfinder. Surfacing the pain gets him going. Is he Oliver Quick? Felix Catton? Or should he pivot to Wolftrap, pull out Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter? ‘This is all my design,’ please let it be? Peel the lungs back, widen the chest cavity, blood eagle?

Queerness is […] it is psychosexual. Showing someone else how you bleed and saying, ‘Love me. Stay.’ Fancy yourself at a club across the pond. Being caught. Sucking the sugar from an edible before swallowing it with your joint pain in the morning. Spend a fortnight playing cat-and-mouse in London, Budapest, Amsterdam. Winner, winner—the girl eats him alive for dinner! Mabrook, mabrook, make sure to send a postcard.

A frog boils. Trumpeting sends the poor boy shuddering through alleyways. Humans are not animals without instincts. Miss Hepburn didn’t have to deal with all this on her Vespa. ‘She’s missing out.’ How could one not feel it when they are being watched?

A large moth throws itself toward the sterile porch light 
kissing my cheek with its soft wings 
Anjali's speaker blasts Taylor Swift's saccharine crooning:
message in a bottle is all i can do / this is a state of grace, you're my achilles heel 
She's insufferable, but Matty Healy isn't much better, you know. 

The street is quiet;
we have reached the point of the evening where nothing moves
not even the birds
a first glance feeling on new york time / i'm the one on the phone as you whisper
I stare at my hands, my typically long nails freshly trimmed 
examine the plain ring on my left hand, the square green one on my right
meet me in the afterglow / autumn air, jacket around my shoulders is yours 
Each breath tastes like Dhaka is on the next block over, waiting for you, (me), us.

Every song has become yours
Harry Styles' flashing [wrong color] eyes, all my references here wildly complex yet clear
the monsters turned out to be just trees / they are the hunters, we are the foxes
Hey, "James Dean daydream," are we out of the woods? Did we ever fall out of fashion? 
The 1975 won't sully the good canon unless you want it to, 
I know where I got my knack for unabashedly direct poetry from. 

With my eyes closed, I'm able to almost feel your face cradled in my hands
wrapped all my mistakes in barbed wire / i don't want to fit wherever (wherever) 
The sensation is materializing, 
my heartbeat thumps this conviction when I'm half-asleep and too tired to overthink 
say my name and everything just stops / i've been sleeping so long in a 21-year dark night
Your face, cradled in my hands. Your face, cradled. My hands. 
Your face. Your face. 

i’m at an open mic 
and with unreasonable courage, 
i’ve brought the guitar 
my dad bought me in sixth grade
i never really learned how to play
i walk up, sit on the stage
explain sheepishly i’m performing
a white girl nepo baby tune
the crowd laughs
i strum, start to sing

the whole time, i’m thinking about
the green-eyed beauty queen 
you tried to replace me with 
dark hair, olive skin, 
pretty incarnate, come-to-life
everything i could never be as a
broad, muscular butch at 5’4 
(and a half)

i’m burning but not with jealousy, 
no, this is something 
incomprehensible, undecipherable 
‘cause she still ended up 
thumbing through the artifacts 
of my digital ghost anyway
trying to deduce what i have
that she doesn’t 
and you two don’t talk 

maybe she thinks 
she’d have your attention
if she could figure it out
how does someone so beautiful 
believe i’m any better?
i’m bewildered despite the evidence
i can’t stop thinking about
how quickly she deactivated 
her not-so-secret burner 

“habibti, when ur acting like #her jealous ex, that’s when it gets too obvious.”

i finish playing, blush at the applause
one day, i’ll get your ring 
and the apology i deserve
you’ll call me the love of your life
but i wonder if the beauty queen
will ever get a proper explanation 
in returning to your wife,
you broke the heart of the girl
i spent too long wishing i was

My heart, my faith, my words, everything in my possession swears fealty to you. This bond rears me as the child of all the dervishes in my lineage. The modern age’s false romantics somehow believe one can replace their muses on a whim. What nonsense! My people would toil through a thousand lifetimes for love. I thus write to you with a most ardent bard’s gall, your eyes forever my compass. O, Lord, society claims piety is foreign, but do they not swoon over the hotly-debated lovers history ignores? Rumi wrote about Shams fervently after his departure and still they are unable to comprehend what you mean to me. Call it unfathomable, explain to me how the truth is unconscionable. Critics be damned, I will never write even one verse for another. This, I guarantee.

Write back at your earliest convenience if it appeals to you, beautiful, do whatever pleases you. You are my favorite poet and most precious muse.