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Crepuscle

 

FOR SHANE

I won’t deny it any longer: the man I love
is a horse galloping through my chest.
Only in thunder may I whisper his name.
          *
I tell his mother I am the sort of man
she will never have to think about.
Shame—face of mulch, mouth of black snow.
          *
In another story, the body was a bloodless
moon and it was caught by trees.
Dying—moon inhabits like an animal.
          *
Someday there will be a night in which a boy
survives falling like light across skin.
Memory—small pocketknife tossed into ravine.
          *
I do not believe the world keeps us
rooted in its forest.
He moves through my body like a god.
          *
By crux of dawn I retreat every mile it takes
to let him live inside of me.
Him—my bloodless moon, my swollen bed of stones.

 

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Peter LaBerge

Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbooks Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017), in which this poem will appear, and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), included on the American Library Association's Over the Rainbow List. His recent work appears or will soon appear in Best New Poets, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Bucknell University Stadler Center for Poetry and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Adroit Journal. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.