Green Linden Press

Discipline and Punish

I was the kind of college student who skipped 
Social Science when Sally or Oprah or Ricky Lake 
hosted the Chippendales dancers. It was the year 

a guy named Jonathan was shocked to learn 
live on The Jenny Jones Show that his friend Scott 
harbored a secret crush on him. The episode 

never aired. I bombed the first paper on Foucault. 
In class, the professor's eyes fluttered when he read 
aloud, he couldn't stop minding the words. 

He was trapped between the language and its echo. 
It was the year I touched no one—except once, 
in the bookstore, by accident, and the look the man 

shot me was all the sentence I could stand. 
A body lives so long before it turns punish to pleasure. 
That's why I failed the paper. On the dorm stoop, 

I used a lit cigarette to burn Dr. Horn's red scrawl, 
watching boys coming in from dinner, sport, study, bars, 
from Tuesday night soirees, boys who projected 

beyond their bodies, filling space around them, the way 
I was learning poetry speaks loudest not in silence 
but restraint, boys who could be both cell and block, 

boys I loathed and lusted, who would never be seen 
with a boy who said soiree. The rush of sockless ankles 
parted around me. But one of them—the guy I had 

a secret crush on—touched my shoulder with his knee, 
asking me for a spare smoke. He leaned down as I lit it, 
his hand on mine, cupped against the wind. If he saw 

the word disciple burning red in my eyes, it didn't register. 
There was no punish in him at all. He puffed a cloud 
of thanks, sauntered off. Jonathan shot Scott twice 

in the chest with a 12-gauge, in Scott's trailer. 
I sat on the steps and perfected the art of staring
ahead while looking askance. When I could no longer

see him, I brought my hand to my nose 
and smelled deep his Dial soap, my tobacco.

Dirty Joke

The secret to picking up a guy, the nipple-ringed bartender 
tells me, is to pretend you've just been told the dirtiest joke. 
I walk around all night: a smirk smoothing away a cringe. 

Are you all right, Duhaney asks me at the bar, 
You look like you just stepped on a nail. He bends 
to my ear, I have such a crush on you. His shirt,

overstarched and missionary-crisp, crinkles
against my bare arm when he tries to kiss me, 
which is when I swan my neck away, 

though I don't remember now how I escaped
what would have been my first kiss—only 
that I was out on the street, holding my arm, 

looking back toward the exit to see if I was safe. 
I stumble back to my car, the drunk waves 
of Biscayne Bay hiccupping upon the unlit beach.

How sure-footed I drove home, into the years
where I act as if a man's attraction to my body
is proof he's gone rotten, or else he's perpetrating

a foul joke on me, some Carrie cowblood-in-the-pail
plotting motherfucker, who should be punished, 
pitied for thinking my body could ever be beautiful.

Interview: a conversation with James Allen Hall on his book Now You’re the Enemy