dear brother

JAKE SKEETS

You kissed a man the way I do

but with a handgun. You called it; I’m the fag

we were afraid to know, the one we’d throw rocks at, huff at like horses.

I learned to touch a man by touching myself. I learned to be a man

by loving one.

Prison is not the chicken wire we’d get tangled in. Remember our bloodied

knees and bloody palms from mangled handlebars, beer bottles,

and cactus spines? Remember the horned toad

we didn’t mean to kill?

Our silence—thick as the dust kicked up by our skinny legs. You are still

that silence. Still that boy holding a deflated body

with your dawning hands.