Ode to Flossing
I like my gums to bleed.
I like my dental hygienist
to be proud of me.
For my 23rd birthday
I asked for a WaterPik,
cleared a spot in the cabinet
for its multiple heads and how
nice to have options.
My roommates prefer me not to
floss on the living room’s green couch.
I don’t see what the problem is.
Sure, I shed green
plastic like golf tees
in the passenger seat,
in the movie theater
before the lights come
up and you’re still
wrapped around me,
but I pick up after myself.
I like my mother
to be proud of me.
OK, fine, sometimes
I’m what she calls a litterbug.
My roommates want me to get my mouth
off the table and I’d like to
put on the table that this is not about
science. I’ve read the studies.
Sorry, another lie. I’ve read the headlines
that report on the studies’ key findings.
I’ve watched my best friend’s six-month old
put everything in his mouth: foam
blocks, limp books, all nearby fingers
and now I know why I know
the taste of household objects.
Not minty but also not such a choking hazard.
Is this about kissing? I don’t do it enough.
My teeth are clean as a whistle
no one’s blowing. No one tells you
how much spit is required
for the saxophone etc.
Sometimes, there is a hair
between your teeth
not of your own making.
Sometimes your underwear
shrinks in the dryer. Sometimes you need
someone else’s teeth
to take it all off.
The thin string
of a thong. I have come
a long way from wedgies
and the boy who pantsed me
in his basement, which made me
hard. He played the saxophone,
that boy. Don’t tell my mother,
but I didn’t use that WaterPik
more than twice
and on my Craigslist ad
I wrote like new.
How to Be Gay
“Advice on how to make sure your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think. By contrast, the scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large.” —Eve K. Sedgwick
Stunningly, at thanksgivings with the Irish family
in the apartment on the third floor, great-grandmother
schlepping over her famously crispy mac-and-cheese
from across the hall, I never learned to stuff
or carve a turkey with silver, stone-sharpened
knives or bind a bird’s legs in twine, but how to fold
napkins into swans. I liked the long cloth necks.
My own neck is long and houses my throat with which I
swallow, which is another bird. Firstly, plumage. You should know
it’s bad luck to wear peacock feathers onstage.
You should know I hated the sound
of my own voice. My mother pointed
the camcorder and out fell a stone. I had a deluded sense
of the role assless chaps would play in my life and preferred to
look at my fingernails alone in my room.
Third, leave your house. Take your tea to go.
Run for the last ferry though you have nowhere to be
and really you’re underdressed for the wind
on the top deck. On the top deck
there is a man who opens his mouth
and out flies a bird. Faygeleh, the eighth
lesson is that you will learn words.
Also it matters who says them,
and I saw myself in the ferry’s whistle.
In the dim, shrub-shaded entrance
to the park across the street, men are playing
football. Secondly, shirts versus skins
and listening to your mother. Sometimes,
you like awake at night
thinking about how lucky you are:
kissing streetlights, taffeta cats
pawing at purple packages of gum in the bodega.
Other times, you realize you haven’t heard
a bird in weeks. The sun’s fled
and in its place a sexually transmitted
depression, another lousy film. I can’t guarantee
you much, not even the seasons.
A cup of tea will get cold on its doily.
Promiscuity I can also promise. A tote bag full
of underwear one size too small.
You’re going to have to give everything
away—a jock for the botanist, trunks
for the best friend who loves elephants. I watched
an old, doleful elephant wobble once
on her four old legs. The sun was setting
and that’s all part of it. I drank a beer
I didn’t like and that’s part of it too.
Sitting on the dock drinking piss
-water knowing for no better reason
than an urge that you must cross
this river, this sliver of rushing silver.
A cormorant comes out of the water.
Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal (he/they) and Kurt David (he/him) are queer bosom buddies in New York and Philadelphia. Their collaborative work has appeared, or soon will, in Foglifter, New Delta Review, poetry.onl, and elsewhere. For more, visit kurt-david.com and isaiahbackgaal.com