except when there’s not, and often there’s just another story, or the same story, different version. He called him faggot from his car, or from his car said die faggot. He yelled cocksucker at the guys who call each other cocksucker for fun, but it wasn’t fun, the neighbor girl called the neighbor boy a homo from her front porch, blowing a whistle, so everyone would look, and everyone did, except those who didn’t and didn’t say anything. The man called the other man a fucking little homo, and the one who was called a fucking little homo threatened to call the police, but didn’t. Three faggots walk into a bar and fuck each other up the ass, said one guy to other guys, and all the guys laughed, except some didn’t, because they didn’t think it was funny, or it was funny but they didn’t want to admit it, and they know faggots them- selves who are good guys even though they’re faggots, or because of it.
No Apologies
Michael says he read in a book that serial killing is down since the 70s and 80s. DNA evidence makes it harder to get away with now. He says it
the way one might say married couples are having babies later in life, or that millennials buy paper
towels instead of napkins. He says when he watches documentaries about murder, he ends up feeling empathy for the killer. James reads me his new poem
over the phone; it’s about a guy who threatened to beat him up when he was young. The guy’s girlfriend
said leave the fag alone, let’s go. A gay fiction writer said he’d forgiven everyone who tortured him
in high school, whether they wanted it or not—he didn’t want to live with that anger.
I congratulated him and unfriended him on Facebook. I point out to James that the girl in his poem
made mercy and shame into the same thing. Michael says: something had to make them that way.
Aaron Smith is the author of four books of poetry: Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Appetite, Primer, and, most recently, The Book of Daniel. He is co-host of Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast.
