A six-part narrative
Here is the valley, and here is the boy,
and the valley does not care about the boy.
The stucco holds the heat like a grudge.
The lawns are the color of what is almost green,
or what remembered green and gave up trying.
He is fourteen, then fifteen, then somehow older,
in a bedroom with a glow-in-the-dark solar system
that no longer glows - the phosphorescence gone,
the planets above him just gray plastic bumps
waiting for a dark that never comes quite dark enough.
(He knows what he is. He has known for years.
He keeps it the way you keep a library book
weeks past its due date - certain the fee
will be large, uncertain how large, putting off
the moment of accounting.)
Outside: the Santa Ana wind moves through the oleanders.
The oleanders are poisonous. This is California's joke -
that the beautiful thing lining every freeway on-ramp
would kill you if you ate it. Everyone knows this.
No one eats it. The oleanders bloom pink all spring.
His mother watches Dawson's Creek in the other room.
His father watches the game. The game is always on.
The refrigerator hums a note that is almost B-flat,
almost a song, almost something you could dance to -
just slightly off, slightly off.
O come down, Bael, lord of the ordinary morning,
three-headed king of the unremarkable -
cat, man, toad, all at once, all staring -
lord of the suburb, lord of the beige millennium,
lord of the Costco and the cul-de-sac and the clock
that ticks above the stove and never matches the microwave.
Tell me: what is the name of the hell
that looks exactly like a Tuesday?
What is the name of the circle
where nothing is wrong, per se?
There is a place between the mountains and the valley floor
where the smog settles like a second sky,
and children breathe it and grow and do not die,
exactly, do not exactly die -
just dim a little, like a room where someone
has replaced every bulb with a slightly weaker bulb.
He rides his bike past the Blockbuster and the Subway
and the nail salon and the other Subway.
He does not know yet that all of this will be gone -
the Blockbuster first, then the feeling of Friday,
then the version of himself that still believes
that August lasts forever and the world is large.
Canto II · Ryan at the Reservoir
His name was Ryan and he had a dirt bike
and a laugh like a screen door catching in the wind,
and he knew every shortcut to the reservoir
where the teenagers went to do what teenagers do -
which is mostly sit and speak in the new tongue
of boys who have discovered that desire exists.
June. The water warm. The year two-thousand-and-two.
Napster was already dead but no one had said so yet,
and the burned CD in Ryan's cup holder still held
every song they'd stolen from the internet -
Saves the Day and Dashboard and that one Weezer deep cut
and something old, something Ryan's older brother left,
some Nirvana thing, some Kurt-before-the-ending thing.
(He pressed his thumb into the case's cracked plastic.
He thought: I am going to remember this forever.
He thought: there is something wrong with me.
He thought: Ryan's shoulder is touching my shoulder.
He thought: the water is the most beautiful color.)
Paimon comes riding a dromedary camel
with a crown and a hoarse, clarion voice,
and what he teaches is the secret things -
sciences, arts, the dignity of princes -
which is to say: he teaches you what you want
before you have the language to want it.
O Paimon, did you put your mouth in the air that year?
Did you sit between the boys at the reservoir
and whisper the syllable that means him,
the syllable that means not just the water,
the syllable that would take years to pronounce
and would cost something to say, and was true?
Ryan said: you're kind of weird, man, but not unkindly.
Ryan said: you're the only person I can talk to.
Ryan said nothing for a long time, looking at the water.
Ryan said: I'm gonna join the Marines after graduation.
Ryan said: my dad says a man needs a purpose.
He said nothing. He was learning the architecture of silence -
how to build a room inside your mouth
and furnish it and live there, quietly,
while your face does something else entirely.
The sun went down the way California suns go down -
spectacular, unasked-for, faintly pornographic,
the smog doing something gorgeous with the light,
turning the whole western sky a color
that has no name and should not be that beautiful
and is.
He is sixteen. He rides home in the dark.
The streetlights make halos on the asphalt.
He is full of something he cannot name
and the fullness is both sweetness and a kind of grief
and he does not know yet that this is what love is -
that love always comes pre-loaded with its loss,
that joy and elegy share a single body,
that the water was beautiful because it was going.
Canto III · Your Mother's Church
Sunday. The sanctuary smells of carpet and carnations.
The pastor has good hair and bad opinions.
He speaks about the body as if the body were a problem
that God invented and then regretted,
which is maybe true, which is maybe the whole thing -
God making flesh and then wincing at it, endlessly,
the way you write a sentence and immediately hate it.
His mother sings. She has a good voice.
He has watched her voice do things in this room
that she cannot do anywhere else -
open, crack open, become briefly enormous,
become briefly the woman she was before the suburb,
before the house, before his father, before him.
(He loves her. This is not the problem.
He loves her and she would not, if she knew -
no. That is not fair. She would love him still.
But something would move between them,
like furniture rearranged in a room you know by heart -
the room still yours, but something wrong,
something you keep almost bumping into in the dark.)
Sitri comes as a leopard with wings of a griffin,
then as a man, beautiful, with beauty weaponized -
he inflames men with women's love, and women with men's,
and can be compelled to make known the secrets,
and he delights in this. He delights in the secret.
He takes special pleasure in the body's confessions.
O Sitri, you were in the hymnbook.
You were in the gap between the pew and the kneeler.
You were in the boys' choir, second row,
the one with the dark eyes who sang the high part,
whose voice hadn't broken yet, who wouldn't look at him,
who looked at him. Who looked.
He prays the way they taught him. He means it.
He means every word and the words don't work
and in the morning he is still himself,
still the architecture of himself, still the specific
and unalterable fact of what he is - the body
doing the body's work without his permission,
the way the heart beats without your asking,
the way the lungs just go ahead and breathe.
Anne Sexton, are you here? You died before he was born
but he found your book behind his aunt's couch
on Thanksgiving, 2001, in the year of the disaster,
and read it in the car ride home, face turned to the window,
pretending to sleep, eyes burning, thinking:
someone said this. someone wrote this down. someone survived it
long enough to make it a poem and then did not survive.
Here is what the church could not give him:
the knowledge that the wound has a grammar.
That the wound, described, is less a wound.
That the body is not a problem to be solved
but a country to be crossed - on foot, in weather,
with insufficient maps, in a language still being learned.
Canto IV · Catalog of the Sunken American Things; or, Norman Rockwell's Missing Paintings
I will tell you what was there. I contain multitudes,
or I contain at least this - a list of the American things:
The Taco Bell on the corner with the broken drive-through speaker
that made every order into a kind of jazz,
The dog at the end of Mariposa Street that lunged and lunged
against the same chain every single day,
The girl from AP History who cried in the parking lot
and wouldn't say why and nobody asked,
The swimming pool in July, the particular green-blue,
the chemical smell of it, the way it stripped your hair,
The boys who were mean the way that boys are mean -
casually, completely, like weather,
The way the 99 Cent Store had the same smell as church,
something low and sweet and dimly institutional,
The Slurpee that went purple-then-red when you mixed it wrong,
which was also the colors of the bruise on Jamie Torres's arm
which no one mentioned, which became its own silence.
Focalor has the form of a man with griffin's wings.
He drowns men and overturns ships.
He can be made to not harm a man if the conjurer asks.
He wants, most of all, to return to the seventh heaven.
(Don't we all. Don't we all want to return
to the heaven we half-remember, the one
that may have been childhood, or may have been
a feeling we had once on a Thursday afternoon
when nothing was happening and that was enough?)
He is seventeen. He has gotten good at being himself in pieces -
the piece that goes to school, the piece that goes to church,
the piece that lies in bed past midnight with the headphones on
listening to songs about girls written by boys
and finding himself inside them anyway, the feeling fitting
even when the pronoun doesn't, the longing
interchangeable and vast and not his alone.
Here is what Norman Rockwell did not paint:
The kid eating lunch alone who has learned to make it look chosen.
The mother crying in the car before she goes inside.
The father who is kind and also absent in the room.
The two boys behind the bleachers not kissing
because they have not learned how fear works yet -
how it comes dressed as choice, dressed as not wanting to,
dressed as I just don't feel like it
dressed as another year of the same room, the same ceiling,
the dead planets overhead that used to glow.
Rockwell painted the America that wanted to be true.
The soup. The doctor. The girl at the soda fountain.
The Thanksgiving table where everyone is fed.
God love him for it. God love the wanting-to-be-true.
There is something American in the aspiration itself -
the painting of the thing you wish were so
until the painting is the thing, almost,
until the image crowds the fact out of the room.
He would like to be painted, once.
He would like someone to look at him and find the image worth keeping.
He would like - and here the sentence stalls, the grammar fails -
he would like.
He would like.
He would. He would. He would.
Canto V · Senior Year, or the Long Corridor Leading Out
There is a corridor in every high school
that smells of floor wax and old lunch
and the specific disinfectant of institutional hope.
He has walked it four years.
He knows every dent in every locker.
He knows which bathroom no one uses
and he knows why no one uses it
and he is not going to say why no one uses it
except to say: there are rooms in every building
that become designated for the designated,
and the designation is its own drowning,
and Focalor was there too, in the fluorescent light,
in the mirror above the sink where a boy
once stood and looked at his own face for a long time
like a man trying to read a document in a language
he almost has.
Dantalion - the seventy-first spirit, a duke -
has the form of a man with many faces,
all human, all speaking at once.
He knows the thoughts of all men and women
and can change them as he will
and he holds a book in his right hand.
(He hid in libraries. Dantalion hid him in libraries.
He hid in the paperbacks with the cracked spines - Whitman,
Whitman with his impossible permission,
Whitman saying I am large, I contain multitudes,
Whitman saying I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
Whitman dead a hundred years still somehow here,
still somehow saying: I know. I know what you are.
I have always known. I am large enough to hold it.
Come in. There is room. There has always been room.)
There was a boy in English who wore the same flannel
every Thursday and read with his whole face -
leaning forward, going slightly open, the way a person
looks when they have forgotten to be defended.
His name was Marcus. He smelled like lilac and the cold outside.
He had a laugh that started slow, a laugh that had to be
convinced of itself before it arrived.
He said, one afternoon in October, sideways,
not looking up from the page:
have you read Giovanni's Room?
And waited.
He had not read Giovanni's Room.
He read Giovanni's Room that night.
He read it the way you drink when you've been thirsty
so long you'd forgotten what thirsty was -
page after page past midnight, the house
settled into its quiet, his parents asleep,
the refrigerator doing its almost-B-flat thing,
and something in his chest was happening,
some mechanism, some - he did not have the word -
some door going, some tumblers, some falling into place
after years of the wrong key, and he kept reading,
and the reading was like being found in a room
you had been hiding in so long you'd forgotten
you were hiding, and someone knocked,
and said your name in the right accent,
and you said wait, no, I'm not -
and they said I know you're there,
and you said you don't understand -
and they said I have always known you were there.
They talked about the book for two weeks.
They talked about the book and they were talking about themselves
and they both knew it and neither of them said so.
That's the thing about the closet - it has very good acoustics.
You can hear everything in it. You can hear what isn't being said.
You become fluent in the grammar of almost,
in the conjugations of if, in theory, hypothetically speaking,
in the long careful sentence that means something
and technically doesn't.
And then one day after school by the chain-link fence
with the oleanders behind it, Marcus said:
I think I might be -
and stopped.
He heard the sentence stop and felt his body do the thing -
the old thing, the animal thing, the thing that had kept him
four years in the corridor, two years at the reservoir,
a decade in the room inside the room inside himself -
the thing that said: you don't have to answer this.
You can say: yeah, totally.
You can say: cool, man, same.
You can say anything. You can say nothing.
You are very good at saying nothing.
You have practiced nothing for years.
Nothing is survivable. Nothing is what you know.
He felt his mouth start to make the nothing-shape.
Marcus was looking at the oleanders.
Marcus's hands were doing something careful in his pockets.
Marcus had just handed him something
and was standing very still, the way you stand
when you have handed someone something fragile,
when the transaction is in the air between you
and the next two seconds will determine
whether you get it back in pieces
or whether someone holds it.
He thought about Ryan at the reservoir.
He thought about Focalor.
He thought about the drowned things at the bottom
holding their shape in the dark, holding their color,
and he thought: I am so tired of being cold.
I am so tired of the preservation.
I want to be warm even if the warmth costs something.
I want to be warm even if I come apart a little at the surface.
He said: yeah.
He said: me too.
Two words. He felt them leave his body.
He felt the shape of the room inside his mouth change -
the furniture moved, some load-bearing wall
quietly revised, the ceiling higher than he'd thought,
more light from a direction he hadn't checked.
He felt - and this is what he could not have predicted -
not relief, not exactly, not yet, not fully -
he felt the specific sensation of no longer lying,
which is different from telling the truth
in a way he would spend years trying to explain -
the absence of the lie, the small unfisting
of something that had been fist a long time,
and Marcus turned and looked at him
and they were both seventeen and terrified
and both still there, both still exactly there,
at the chain-link fence with the oleanders behind it
blooming poisonous and pink in the late October light.
The Santa Ana wind moved through the oleanders.
The oleanders didn't care.
Somewhere the dog lunged to the end of its chain.
Somewhere Jamie Torres walked home by himself.
Somewhere his father watched the fourth quarter.
Somewhere Focalor made a note in whatever Focalor uses
instead of a notebook - these two, risen. These two, surface.
Not my work anymore. The other kind of work now.
Somewhere in the seventh heaven a door
opened slightly, or Focalor believed it did,
which for Focalor may be the same thing.
He rode home in the dark with the halos on the asphalt.
He was full of the two words and the two words were enough.
Not everything. Not the whole life. Not the hard years coming.
But enough - a crack in the hull of the silence,
water coming in or air getting out,
one or the other, he cannot tell yet,
one or the other, and either way: a change in pressure.
Either way: the surface, somewhere above,
catching what light there is.
Canto VI · Benediction in the Key of Almost-B-Flat
Here is what happened after the fence.
Not the movie version. Not the version
where the telling of the secret dissolves the secret
and everyone adjusts and the light changes
and you are free now, you are finally free -
not that. The other version.
The one where you go home and sit at dinner
and your parents pass the green beans
and you have said two words to Marcus at a fence
and the words are still in your body, warm, foreign,
and your father says how was school
and you say fine
and you mean: I am on fire.
You mean: I said a true thing today.
You mean: I do not know how to live in this house anymore
and I love you and I am terrified of you
and the green beans are getting cold
and I will not say any of this for another two years.
Here is what happened in the two years.
He got good at Marcus. He got good at the space
between the flannel and the lilac smell,
at the way a hand could mean something
in a car in the dark in a parking lot
of a Denny's on a Tuesday,
the trademarked holiness of a Denny's on a Tuesday,
the Grand Slam at midnight, the bad coffee,
the waitress who did not care, who brought more coffee,
who was tired and good at her work
and asked nothing of them except the tip,
which they left, which they could barely afford to leave.
God bless the Denny's. God bless the unasking spaces.
God bless every fluorescent room that ever held
two boys becoming themselves at midnight.
Here is what happened with his mother.
She cried once, alone - he heard it through the wall.
Then she did not cry again, not where he could hear.
She made his favorite dinner the following Sunday.
She did not mention the dinner was his favorite.
She passed him the bread and said eat
in the voice that has always meant I love you,
the voice that has always meant
I do not have the words but I have this bread
and I am handing you this bread
and you will take it.
He took it.
He is still taking it.
That is the whole of that story.
Here is what happened with his father -
No.
Not yet.
Some rooms you open slowly.
Some rooms you stand outside of for years
holding the key, just holding it.
He is still outside that room.
He will be outside it a while yet.
The key is warm from being held so long.
That's enough. That's something. The key is warm.
I am not going to tell you it was fine.
There were years that had the texture of a locked room.
There were years of learning the geography of a body
that had been secret so long it did not know
how to exist in the open, how to be
in the daylight and touched and not flinch -
or not flinch visibly, which is its own skill,
its own long education.
There were people who left. Not cruelly.
Just quietly, the way things leave in suburbs -
one day present, one day a different parking lot,
a different freeway, a different life
doing its different living somewhere else.
There were people who stayed. Not easily.
There was his own face in mirrors at twenty,
at twenty-three, at whatever age it was
when the face started looking like him -
not the boy from the valley, not the kept secret,
not the room inside the mouth -
just: him. Tired, intact, still here.
And Ryan. Ryan joined the Marines.
Ryan went to the desert, came back different,
went again, came back more different.
He got a postcard once, from the first deployment -
just: still alive. you?
He wrote back: still alive. me.
They were both still alive.
That was the whole conversation.
That was enough.
Here is what the valley made -
and I mean made, I mean the kiln of it,
the 107-degree August of it,
the smog-bowl, the oleander,
the almost-B-flat -
here is what the beige millennium made -
here is what the silence made -
here is what the church, the corridor,
the reservoir, the Denny's,
the dead planets, the burned CD,
the wrong key for years and then the right one -
here is what it made:
me.
Not the version anyone was prepared for.
Not the version that comes out clean on the other side.
The version with the scar-tissue knowledge,
the one who learned longing before he learned language,
the one who is fluent in almost,
the one who still sometimes makes the nothing-shape
with his mouth before he catches himself -
catches himself and opens,
opens and says the thing,
says the thing and does not die.
Dante ascends through fire and is changed.
The stars move.
The love moves the sun.
What moves here is smaller.
What moves here is:
the bread his mother handed him.
the postcard from the desert.
Marcus's hands in his pockets at the fence.
the waitress who brought more coffee.
the key, warm from being held.
These are not small things.
I have been calling them small things.
They are not small things.
Poetry by Antonio
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Written on 2026-05-30 at 02:43
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The Valley Commedia
Canto I · Tract Home Nativity; or, The Boy in the Beige MillenniumHere is the valley, and here is the boy,
and the valley does not care about the boy.
The stucco holds the heat like a grudge.
The lawns are the color of what is almost green,
or what remembered green and gave up trying.
He is fourteen, then fifteen, then somehow older,
in a bedroom with a glow-in-the-dark solar system
that no longer glows - the phosphorescence gone,
the planets above him just gray plastic bumps
waiting for a dark that never comes quite dark enough.
(He knows what he is. He has known for years.
He keeps it the way you keep a library book
weeks past its due date - certain the fee
will be large, uncertain how large, putting off
the moment of accounting.)
Outside: the Santa Ana wind moves through the oleanders.
The oleanders are poisonous. This is California's joke -
that the beautiful thing lining every freeway on-ramp
would kill you if you ate it. Everyone knows this.
No one eats it. The oleanders bloom pink all spring.
His mother watches Dawson's Creek in the other room.
His father watches the game. The game is always on.
The refrigerator hums a note that is almost B-flat,
almost a song, almost something you could dance to -
just slightly off, slightly off.
O come down, Bael, lord of the ordinary morning,
three-headed king of the unremarkable -
cat, man, toad, all at once, all staring -
lord of the suburb, lord of the beige millennium,
lord of the Costco and the cul-de-sac and the clock
that ticks above the stove and never matches the microwave.
Tell me: what is the name of the hell
that looks exactly like a Tuesday?
What is the name of the circle
where nothing is wrong, per se?
There is a place between the mountains and the valley floor
where the smog settles like a second sky,
and children breathe it and grow and do not die,
exactly, do not exactly die -
just dim a little, like a room where someone
has replaced every bulb with a slightly weaker bulb.
He rides his bike past the Blockbuster and the Subway
and the nail salon and the other Subway.
He does not know yet that all of this will be gone -
the Blockbuster first, then the feeling of Friday,
then the version of himself that still believes
that August lasts forever and the world is large.
Canto II · Ryan at the Reservoir
His name was Ryan and he had a dirt bike
and a laugh like a screen door catching in the wind,
and he knew every shortcut to the reservoir
where the teenagers went to do what teenagers do -
which is mostly sit and speak in the new tongue
of boys who have discovered that desire exists.
June. The water warm. The year two-thousand-and-two.
Napster was already dead but no one had said so yet,
and the burned CD in Ryan's cup holder still held
every song they'd stolen from the internet -
Saves the Day and Dashboard and that one Weezer deep cut
and something old, something Ryan's older brother left,
some Nirvana thing, some Kurt-before-the-ending thing.
(He pressed his thumb into the case's cracked plastic.
He thought: I am going to remember this forever.
He thought: there is something wrong with me.
He thought: Ryan's shoulder is touching my shoulder.
He thought: the water is the most beautiful color.)
Paimon comes riding a dromedary camel
with a crown and a hoarse, clarion voice,
and what he teaches is the secret things -
sciences, arts, the dignity of princes -
which is to say: he teaches you what you want
before you have the language to want it.
O Paimon, did you put your mouth in the air that year?
Did you sit between the boys at the reservoir
and whisper the syllable that means him,
the syllable that means not just the water,
the syllable that would take years to pronounce
and would cost something to say, and was true?
Ryan said: you're kind of weird, man, but not unkindly.
Ryan said: you're the only person I can talk to.
Ryan said nothing for a long time, looking at the water.
Ryan said: I'm gonna join the Marines after graduation.
Ryan said: my dad says a man needs a purpose.
He said nothing. He was learning the architecture of silence -
how to build a room inside your mouth
and furnish it and live there, quietly,
while your face does something else entirely.
The sun went down the way California suns go down -
spectacular, unasked-for, faintly pornographic,
the smog doing something gorgeous with the light,
turning the whole western sky a color
that has no name and should not be that beautiful
and is.
He is sixteen. He rides home in the dark.
The streetlights make halos on the asphalt.
He is full of something he cannot name
and the fullness is both sweetness and a kind of grief
and he does not know yet that this is what love is -
that love always comes pre-loaded with its loss,
that joy and elegy share a single body,
that the water was beautiful because it was going.
Canto III · Your Mother's Church
Sunday. The sanctuary smells of carpet and carnations.
The pastor has good hair and bad opinions.
He speaks about the body as if the body were a problem
that God invented and then regretted,
which is maybe true, which is maybe the whole thing -
God making flesh and then wincing at it, endlessly,
the way you write a sentence and immediately hate it.
His mother sings. She has a good voice.
He has watched her voice do things in this room
that she cannot do anywhere else -
open, crack open, become briefly enormous,
become briefly the woman she was before the suburb,
before the house, before his father, before him.
(He loves her. This is not the problem.
He loves her and she would not, if she knew -
no. That is not fair. She would love him still.
But something would move between them,
like furniture rearranged in a room you know by heart -
the room still yours, but something wrong,
something you keep almost bumping into in the dark.)
Sitri comes as a leopard with wings of a griffin,
then as a man, beautiful, with beauty weaponized -
he inflames men with women's love, and women with men's,
and can be compelled to make known the secrets,
and he delights in this. He delights in the secret.
He takes special pleasure in the body's confessions.
O Sitri, you were in the hymnbook.
You were in the gap between the pew and the kneeler.
You were in the boys' choir, second row,
the one with the dark eyes who sang the high part,
whose voice hadn't broken yet, who wouldn't look at him,
who looked at him. Who looked.
He prays the way they taught him. He means it.
He means every word and the words don't work
and in the morning he is still himself,
still the architecture of himself, still the specific
and unalterable fact of what he is - the body
doing the body's work without his permission,
the way the heart beats without your asking,
the way the lungs just go ahead and breathe.
Anne Sexton, are you here? You died before he was born
but he found your book behind his aunt's couch
on Thanksgiving, 2001, in the year of the disaster,
and read it in the car ride home, face turned to the window,
pretending to sleep, eyes burning, thinking:
someone said this. someone wrote this down. someone survived it
long enough to make it a poem and then did not survive.
Here is what the church could not give him:
the knowledge that the wound has a grammar.
That the wound, described, is less a wound.
That the body is not a problem to be solved
but a country to be crossed - on foot, in weather,
with insufficient maps, in a language still being learned.
Canto IV · Catalog of the Sunken American Things; or, Norman Rockwell's Missing Paintings
I will tell you what was there. I contain multitudes,
or I contain at least this - a list of the American things:
The Taco Bell on the corner with the broken drive-through speaker
that made every order into a kind of jazz,
The dog at the end of Mariposa Street that lunged and lunged
against the same chain every single day,
The girl from AP History who cried in the parking lot
and wouldn't say why and nobody asked,
The swimming pool in July, the particular green-blue,
the chemical smell of it, the way it stripped your hair,
The boys who were mean the way that boys are mean -
casually, completely, like weather,
The way the 99 Cent Store had the same smell as church,
something low and sweet and dimly institutional,
The Slurpee that went purple-then-red when you mixed it wrong,
which was also the colors of the bruise on Jamie Torres's arm
which no one mentioned, which became its own silence.
Focalor has the form of a man with griffin's wings.
He drowns men and overturns ships.
He can be made to not harm a man if the conjurer asks.
He wants, most of all, to return to the seventh heaven.
(Don't we all. Don't we all want to return
to the heaven we half-remember, the one
that may have been childhood, or may have been
a feeling we had once on a Thursday afternoon
when nothing was happening and that was enough?)
He is seventeen. He has gotten good at being himself in pieces -
the piece that goes to school, the piece that goes to church,
the piece that lies in bed past midnight with the headphones on
listening to songs about girls written by boys
and finding himself inside them anyway, the feeling fitting
even when the pronoun doesn't, the longing
interchangeable and vast and not his alone.
Here is what Norman Rockwell did not paint:
The kid eating lunch alone who has learned to make it look chosen.
The mother crying in the car before she goes inside.
The father who is kind and also absent in the room.
The two boys behind the bleachers not kissing
because they have not learned how fear works yet -
how it comes dressed as choice, dressed as not wanting to,
dressed as I just don't feel like it
dressed as another year of the same room, the same ceiling,
the dead planets overhead that used to glow.
Rockwell painted the America that wanted to be true.
The soup. The doctor. The girl at the soda fountain.
The Thanksgiving table where everyone is fed.
God love him for it. God love the wanting-to-be-true.
There is something American in the aspiration itself -
the painting of the thing you wish were so
until the painting is the thing, almost,
until the image crowds the fact out of the room.
He would like to be painted, once.
He would like someone to look at him and find the image worth keeping.
He would like - and here the sentence stalls, the grammar fails -
he would like.
He would like.
He would. He would. He would.
Canto V · Senior Year, or the Long Corridor Leading Out
There is a corridor in every high school
that smells of floor wax and old lunch
and the specific disinfectant of institutional hope.
He has walked it four years.
He knows every dent in every locker.
He knows which bathroom no one uses
and he knows why no one uses it
and he is not going to say why no one uses it
except to say: there are rooms in every building
that become designated for the designated,
and the designation is its own drowning,
and Focalor was there too, in the fluorescent light,
in the mirror above the sink where a boy
once stood and looked at his own face for a long time
like a man trying to read a document in a language
he almost has.
Dantalion - the seventy-first spirit, a duke -
has the form of a man with many faces,
all human, all speaking at once.
He knows the thoughts of all men and women
and can change them as he will
and he holds a book in his right hand.
(He hid in libraries. Dantalion hid him in libraries.
He hid in the paperbacks with the cracked spines - Whitman,
Whitman with his impossible permission,
Whitman saying I am large, I contain multitudes,
Whitman saying I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
Whitman dead a hundred years still somehow here,
still somehow saying: I know. I know what you are.
I have always known. I am large enough to hold it.
Come in. There is room. There has always been room.)
There was a boy in English who wore the same flannel
every Thursday and read with his whole face -
leaning forward, going slightly open, the way a person
looks when they have forgotten to be defended.
His name was Marcus. He smelled like lilac and the cold outside.
He had a laugh that started slow, a laugh that had to be
convinced of itself before it arrived.
He said, one afternoon in October, sideways,
not looking up from the page:
have you read Giovanni's Room?
And waited.
He had not read Giovanni's Room.
He read Giovanni's Room that night.
He read it the way you drink when you've been thirsty
so long you'd forgotten what thirsty was -
page after page past midnight, the house
settled into its quiet, his parents asleep,
the refrigerator doing its almost-B-flat thing,
and something in his chest was happening,
some mechanism, some - he did not have the word -
some door going, some tumblers, some falling into place
after years of the wrong key, and he kept reading,
and the reading was like being found in a room
you had been hiding in so long you'd forgotten
you were hiding, and someone knocked,
and said your name in the right accent,
and you said wait, no, I'm not -
and they said I know you're there,
and you said you don't understand -
and they said I have always known you were there.
They talked about the book for two weeks.
They talked about the book and they were talking about themselves
and they both knew it and neither of them said so.
That's the thing about the closet - it has very good acoustics.
You can hear everything in it. You can hear what isn't being said.
You become fluent in the grammar of almost,
in the conjugations of if, in theory, hypothetically speaking,
in the long careful sentence that means something
and technically doesn't.
And then one day after school by the chain-link fence
with the oleanders behind it, Marcus said:
I think I might be -
and stopped.
He heard the sentence stop and felt his body do the thing -
the old thing, the animal thing, the thing that had kept him
four years in the corridor, two years at the reservoir,
a decade in the room inside the room inside himself -
the thing that said: you don't have to answer this.
You can say: yeah, totally.
You can say: cool, man, same.
You can say anything. You can say nothing.
You are very good at saying nothing.
You have practiced nothing for years.
Nothing is survivable. Nothing is what you know.
He felt his mouth start to make the nothing-shape.
Marcus was looking at the oleanders.
Marcus's hands were doing something careful in his pockets.
Marcus had just handed him something
and was standing very still, the way you stand
when you have handed someone something fragile,
when the transaction is in the air between you
and the next two seconds will determine
whether you get it back in pieces
or whether someone holds it.
He thought about Ryan at the reservoir.
He thought about Focalor.
He thought about the drowned things at the bottom
holding their shape in the dark, holding their color,
and he thought: I am so tired of being cold.
I am so tired of the preservation.
I want to be warm even if the warmth costs something.
I want to be warm even if I come apart a little at the surface.
He said: yeah.
He said: me too.
Two words. He felt them leave his body.
He felt the shape of the room inside his mouth change -
the furniture moved, some load-bearing wall
quietly revised, the ceiling higher than he'd thought,
more light from a direction he hadn't checked.
He felt - and this is what he could not have predicted -
not relief, not exactly, not yet, not fully -
he felt the specific sensation of no longer lying,
which is different from telling the truth
in a way he would spend years trying to explain -
the absence of the lie, the small unfisting
of something that had been fist a long time,
and Marcus turned and looked at him
and they were both seventeen and terrified
and both still there, both still exactly there,
at the chain-link fence with the oleanders behind it
blooming poisonous and pink in the late October light.
The Santa Ana wind moved through the oleanders.
The oleanders didn't care.
Somewhere the dog lunged to the end of its chain.
Somewhere Jamie Torres walked home by himself.
Somewhere his father watched the fourth quarter.
Somewhere Focalor made a note in whatever Focalor uses
instead of a notebook - these two, risen. These two, surface.
Not my work anymore. The other kind of work now.
Somewhere in the seventh heaven a door
opened slightly, or Focalor believed it did,
which for Focalor may be the same thing.
He rode home in the dark with the halos on the asphalt.
He was full of the two words and the two words were enough.
Not everything. Not the whole life. Not the hard years coming.
But enough - a crack in the hull of the silence,
water coming in or air getting out,
one or the other, he cannot tell yet,
one or the other, and either way: a change in pressure.
Either way: the surface, somewhere above,
catching what light there is.
Canto VI · Benediction in the Key of Almost-B-Flat
Here is what happened after the fence.
Not the movie version. Not the version
where the telling of the secret dissolves the secret
and everyone adjusts and the light changes
and you are free now, you are finally free -
not that. The other version.
The one where you go home and sit at dinner
and your parents pass the green beans
and you have said two words to Marcus at a fence
and the words are still in your body, warm, foreign,
and your father says how was school
and you say fine
and you mean: I am on fire.
You mean: I said a true thing today.
You mean: I do not know how to live in this house anymore
and I love you and I am terrified of you
and the green beans are getting cold
and I will not say any of this for another two years.
Here is what happened in the two years.
He got good at Marcus. He got good at the space
between the flannel and the lilac smell,
at the way a hand could mean something
in a car in the dark in a parking lot
of a Denny's on a Tuesday,
the trademarked holiness of a Denny's on a Tuesday,
the Grand Slam at midnight, the bad coffee,
the waitress who did not care, who brought more coffee,
who was tired and good at her work
and asked nothing of them except the tip,
which they left, which they could barely afford to leave.
God bless the Denny's. God bless the unasking spaces.
God bless every fluorescent room that ever held
two boys becoming themselves at midnight.
Here is what happened with his mother.
She cried once, alone - he heard it through the wall.
Then she did not cry again, not where he could hear.
She made his favorite dinner the following Sunday.
She did not mention the dinner was his favorite.
She passed him the bread and said eat
in the voice that has always meant I love you,
the voice that has always meant
I do not have the words but I have this bread
and I am handing you this bread
and you will take it.
He took it.
He is still taking it.
That is the whole of that story.
Here is what happened with his father -
No.
Not yet.
Some rooms you open slowly.
Some rooms you stand outside of for years
holding the key, just holding it.
He is still outside that room.
He will be outside it a while yet.
The key is warm from being held so long.
That's enough. That's something. The key is warm.
I am not going to tell you it was fine.
There were years that had the texture of a locked room.
There were years of learning the geography of a body
that had been secret so long it did not know
how to exist in the open, how to be
in the daylight and touched and not flinch -
or not flinch visibly, which is its own skill,
its own long education.
There were people who left. Not cruelly.
Just quietly, the way things leave in suburbs -
one day present, one day a different parking lot,
a different freeway, a different life
doing its different living somewhere else.
There were people who stayed. Not easily.
There was his own face in mirrors at twenty,
at twenty-three, at whatever age it was
when the face started looking like him -
not the boy from the valley, not the kept secret,
not the room inside the mouth -
just: him. Tired, intact, still here.
And Ryan. Ryan joined the Marines.
Ryan went to the desert, came back different,
went again, came back more different.
He got a postcard once, from the first deployment -
just: still alive. you?
He wrote back: still alive. me.
They were both still alive.
That was the whole conversation.
That was enough.
Here is what the valley made -
and I mean made, I mean the kiln of it,
the 107-degree August of it,
the smog-bowl, the oleander,
the almost-B-flat -
here is what the beige millennium made -
here is what the silence made -
here is what the church, the corridor,
the reservoir, the Denny's,
the dead planets, the burned CD,
the wrong key for years and then the right one -
here is what it made:
me.
Not the version anyone was prepared for.
Not the version that comes out clean on the other side.
The version with the scar-tissue knowledge,
the one who learned longing before he learned language,
the one who is fluent in almost,
the one who still sometimes makes the nothing-shape
with his mouth before he catches himself -
catches himself and opens,
opens and says the thing,
says the thing and does not die.
Dante ascends through fire and is changed.
The stars move.
The love moves the sun.
What moves here is smaller.
What moves here is:
the bread his mother handed him.
the postcard from the desert.
Marcus's hands in his pockets at the fence.
the waitress who brought more coffee.
the key, warm from being held.
These are not small things.
I have been calling them small things.
They are not small things.
Poetry by Antonio
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Written on 2026-05-30 at 02:43
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