LOUDSPEAKER:: Poetry by Jacob Budenz

Writing

Apr 21

Featured

WUSSY is proud to present poetry by Jacob Budenz.
If you would like to send in a writing submission, please contact Nicholas Goodly.

A Sphinx, My Body

The game is simple: a man comes down
the bumpy road, wilderness trapped
in the sweep of his curls and the bugs
half-drowned in his sweat-pooled chest,
and I ask him how to please me.

Inevitably he fails,
and I eat him alive.

My gender is a sphinx, my body
her riddle—the body of a girl
with chest hair for cleavage
and a smile wider than her
swimmer’s shoulders. Imagine
a man descends the dusty
hillside to tell her
anything,

let alone a man with a beard like
oil in a snowstorm and a voice like
swift wind through a valley: high
and bellowing. A man. Such a man
might catch such a sphinx off guard, be
one thing in the morning and quite another
in the evening, to say nothing of high noon.

Still, that sphinx, yes, she must eat, no matter
the wildness of her next big meal.

R.A.T. (Rapidly Aging Twink)

How much more do you have to teach me, science man?

How the difference between a possum and a rat
is a pouch for babies at the belly of the mother?

How the difference between a bat and a bird
is beak and jaw, egg and womb, feather and fur?

How effortlessly you flit
between one and the other—
mammal that looks like a bird,
friend that looks like a flame.

How I stay firmly on the ground,
nocturnal like you, but
curled in a big, tin can
around the sloppy seconds
of someone else’s dinner,
not even eating it but hissing
when it’s taken away—
playing dead when you move on me,
thrashing like a jealous poltergeist
when you move on.

How “we are all in the gutter but
some of us are looking at the stars”
except you, who are the gutter itself
and the stars
and the bat
and the bird, the possum,
while I am only the rapidly
aging twink, gazing
up at you while I
am in you, or lying
with my head on your
stomach and staring at the
stars beyond the ceiling, the
clouds, the bluish haze
of mid-sized city light
and wondering how
a rat like me might
fucking grow a pair
of leather wings
like yours.

—
Jacob Budenz is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans, a BA from Johns Hopkins, and work out in journals including Entropy Magazine, Ghost City Review, Slip Stream Press, and more. You can follow more of Jake's work on Instagram (@dreambabyjake), Twitter (@jakebeearts), and the internet beyond (www.jakebeearts.com).