Splendor & Survival
Francis eats baklava on a rumpled bed,
admiring his own thighs. You’re a bull, Leo teases
(photons are kissing his haunches peacher
and peacher, that much
he surmises & accepts).
Francis gets stuck visualizing blue photons,
cresting light on a cheap
silk bluebonnet.
On sunny mornings atoms hang in air,
sheer nucleic buttons.
At night,
his corn snake’s mouth is a pink cave,
comforting him as he watches
the borders of matter dissolve on Leo’s face.
Francis integrates realms–
enamored of scales that aren’t relevant
to our eyes or voices or minds.
Leo massages
Francis’s glutes, pistachio & rosewater fingers
on his ass cheeks. Mario Bava’s color plumes–
sulfur and magenta–
tangible enough
he could peel them from the screen.
Pansy circuits of splendor and survival–
quarks in color and antithesis.
Rio Bravo
You tell me to wear a pink shirt
slit down to the navel. Manly, you said.
Like Dean Martin in Rio Bravo. A turn on the horse,
spanked with your true branch. It has weight;
it swipes my thighs and kisses. Yoke me
with outlaw words.
What’s a sunset doing on a man’s
cheeks, the full harvest moon
of his needs?
The frames steam.
John Wayne’s branch has no weight;
It swipes the night and splinters, kisses
no one.
You want me to have the strapping
boots, a flick to my wrist meaning
I know my way around some reins.
Gunpowder. A stalled train
and smeared stage makeup.
We’d ride off, sun licking up
the shadows of men.
It turns me on when you say it, Leo.
Say it again.
Wren Hanks is the author of Lily-livered (Driftwood Press), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and The Rise of Genderqueer (Brain Mill Press). He is an alum of the Tin House Workshop and the Lambda Writer's Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and he was recently awarded a 2026 Vermont Studio Center residency. His recent writing appears in Foglifter, No Tokens, RHINO, The Journal, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor for smoke and mold and lives in Brooklyn, where he works in animal advocacy and sings with Grace Chorale of Brooklyn. You can find more of his writing at wrenhanks.com