If you were my gay father and I, your brazenly lesbian heir

 

I would follow your gaunt silhouette

 Against a static backdrop of black

 And white frames impeccable

Labyrinth,  antique furniture

With Daedalus wings constructed

out of wire hangers, crisp altar

 boy haircut hoping you would fall in love

Hoping you would notice

The subtle idiosyncratic pinch

My fingers slicing the gap

Between your palms

Shuffling through polaroid’s

 naked high school football players

posing after you bought them beer.

If you were my gay father and I,

Your lesbian heir I would

Bathe naked with you in Beech Creek

Forming a geodesic alphabet with

The neck of my limbs,

a public free swim

chlorine nipples buoyed

groomed musk of your neck

wanting you to breath me

into the ocean

 with the laconic

tic of your tongue.

If you were my gay father

I would pin barrette’s in your

scalp, read you Kate Millet

As you rotisseried in the sun

 Polish the bulb on every closet door

With scepters of Joy, whistle

Bicentennial chorus, boys

With the packages resembling

three-cornered hats, boutonnière

neon shingles illuminating overhead.

 

 

 

 

 

If you were my gay father

And I your lesbian heir

I would lie supine, listless in

The Mortuary you inhabited from your mother

Allow you to dissect my flesh

Incise my lower abdomen with

Grade school scissors, Elmers glue

 Grope my organs with latex

 dactyls, all

in the Sisyphus of your wrists.

 

 

 

 

 

If you were my gay father

And I, your brazenly lesbian heir

I would voluntarily

Walk with you

Into the flush of afternoon traffic

 A Beam of sun,  a high-

Pitched shriek, the velocity

Taste of chrome kissed

Cement

Planting myself over your grave

My heart, a concrete phallus

Odalisque  the chimney

To a fun home

We never found.

 

 

 

--Inspired by the tragicomic graphic novel FUN HOME by Alison Bechedel 

 

--written for Barbara Antoniazzi w. hugs...