“Otago University students bite leg off duck
in twisted Dunedin flat initiation” — New Zealand Herald
Boys bite the legs off live ducks,
weep in their bedrooms afterwards.
I have a sick hollow in my stomach
as we fight about time—how much of you
can be for me. I feel so small
asking for this. In my heart, I
know it’s wrong. I think I don’t
love myself enough
to stop begging.
Boys are made to drink
from enormous funnels—
until they black out. Ranfurly
in boxes, carried under their arms
to the party.
Heads are dunked in vomit
for failure of throat diameter,
of soft gullet—baby birds
with eyes still glued shut.
Craning and keening.
High-pitched fledgling voices
and too-big food.
You give Sunday back to me
like a gift, and my heart
believes again, but the fight—
the fight has taken it out of us.
Afterward we are like magnets,
our bodies collide.
I think you are laughing at me,
but you’re not, you’re delighting,
you break down and cry
with my ass cheeks in each of your hands.
I hold your face in mine, kiss your forehead,
your eyelids, your temples.
No, my love. I know. I know.
These boys, they
want to belong, have barely had a chance to
look around. Blacked out by noon,
one boy wakes on the lawn at dusk
to find his hair has been buzzed.
It’s not the humiliation that arrests him—
it’s how he didn’t die there in the grass,
though he’d poisoned himself for the dying
and been left by older boys who
carelessly mounted belonging, rode it away
like a hobby horse in the gloaming.
But that fight (and reconciliation)
gives way to the next one,
and you say things you
can’t take back. You believe
you can take it all back, once
I have accepted the truth you peddle,
but your cruelties line up in my memory
like little soldiers. Each one of them
takes aim at me, and I can’t unsee them.
On the asphalt next to the boy:
the wide open mouth of an eel, someone’s
unsmoked cigarette stuffed into its gullet,
silvery eyes frozen and un-alive—
the concentric reflections inside them
are invisible to the human eye
but it’s what he thinks about as he
lifts himself onto his elbow and
remembers how it felt to be cheered
for forgetting everything he knew
about loving before he
came to university.
Last week I sat on your couch and
marked stories while you watched
Sex Education—the episode I saw
without you while we were “broken up”
for a weekend. We ate cookies
baked by your Mormon friend.
We held hands, and I typed
with my free index finger.
The biggest pattern of error
is syntax, I pecked out.
Watch out for fragments.
Exceptional use of dialogue.
Believable characters.
It’s hard for me to teach them after that.
I can’t unsee those ducks in my mind’s eye.
The boys will show up for class
today, a little dusty from the weekend.
The only mercy is in not knowing
which of them.
Not knowing
which
ones.
Yesterday you left me in anger again.
It becomes our pattern: you arrive, I feed you
the product of my afternoon’s labour:
this time it’s pumpkin soup, cheese scones.
We grow silent. Something is wrong.
Off. You are triggered. I offer what I know
to give: my love, my time. Even money.
It’s not enough, not given freely.
As you drive away, so little petrol
in your car you might not make it home,
I don’t move from the couch.
I consider running after the car—
but I don’t this time.
The boys write essays and raise their hands
to ask pertinent questions. They want to be good,
after all. But they are betrayed by the haze
that still hangs around their ears and eyes,
by their nearly imperceptible squinting.
We think it is to bring it all into focus,
but they are trying to make it go blurry.
Featured image by Noe Erger-Karogjozoska.
