Dear Emily is thinking about the Alabama queer book-ban and wrote a poem about a queer epiphany from childhood. Inspired, I’ll toss mine in the mix.

Biblical Knowing
        —after Madeleine L’Engels Many Waters, for Emily

Strapping teenage boys, jocks
with cocky attitudes and quick smiles—

the twin Murray boys, Sandy and Dennys,
left to their own devices among the strange devices
of their scientist parents, then absent,
tumble headlong into the time

of loincloths, of blond boys with their skin so tan
the new hair of their arms goes white,
combed into neat Zen garden rows.

The two mauve rosebuds of their chests
taste the dry air and bloom.

Oh Sodom.
Oh Sodom.

Let me be alive like this,
half-naked and deserted where I sense soon,
soon, torrential rains
will douse the land. I will be—yes—
carried away,

teenage boy with the heart half-broken
stumbling darkly toward its long-lost twin.