If we do this, promise me you’ll untie the sailor knotted ropes and rescue my body. I don’t want to be fire’s hostage, scorching, becoming a raspberry incandescent. Promise me you’ll breathe fresh, crisp, opium back into my lungs, or at least give me the pleasures of erotic asphyxiation, blurred vision, an entitled giddiness— A rouge undertone rushes my face and swells my neck as my pulse accelerates its ticking in anticipation, and my toes anxiously curl around the detonator, my muscles contour and contract right before you fuel them up, right before my body’s inevitable little deaths. If we do this, at least promise me, some kind of flame retardant afterlife. Tell me our wings won’t be made of phosphorous or carbon, or covered in feathers, or wild silk. Say this heat doesn’t last forever. Fly me to the rock wool garden. Show me how to play with matches in paradise and not feel the flame’s wrath. Though what game is worth winning where there is no risk of loss? What love, where there’s no risk it burns you alive? Here, in death’s throat, we men risk the swallow to savor the cave’s salt and natural gasoline, its octane tang, its parched volatility, to thirst for ignition, for death by combustion, for the boom, and to, just like that, disappear. Face to face in a lip-locked detonation with our greatest fears and greatest courage, let’s leave this world big banging into the apocalypse no one, otherwise, will survive.
114 The Paris-American
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a writer-producer in New York. His poems have been published in Callaloo, The Feminist Wire, The Caribbean Writer, Lambda Literary, featured on The Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere in print and online.