queer conversations around fifteen feet of flames

I. Whiskey shots in lime green cups lined up on the headstone
make us loud and then quiet. We smile wide to pay our respects
to him
and the stories that entertained him that are gone forever now.
Because we cannot, will not, return to those dark days
the armor weighed us down so we left it behind.
But these stories made him laugh for a while, and he gave us many wonderful things.
Tonight we will try to enjoy them.

II. Your time in the military makes me want to tell you everything I know
about being lonely and being afraid,
being erased and silenced and threatened.
But I don't want to remind you of what you're trying to forget tonight.
I'm glad you're here not there
even though there are worse places to be.

III. The smoke from the tires tastes sour and burnt,
the way I feel when they say "boy parts" and "girl parts"
lazy words to hide their discomfort with sex and honesty.
I'm not sure quite what it is they're trying to say
but I know it has nothing to do with me.
My breath is sweet like booze and fruit when I try to explain
with a story that's bitter like drunken bile
in a language so common it's background noise
that no one will understand, let alone remember
when they just hear incoherent pain.

IV.  The half moon watches us congregating in a midnight field
dying embers and hoarse voices, just like every summer for the last ten years
the last ten thousand years
and momentarily I imagine that she's smiled down on queerer bacchanals than this
where there was a version of me in less desperate torment
who roamed more freely but was no less fluid
and maybe even proud of this body, maybe celebrated
on this very same grass.
Maybe she's someone I could meet someday.

V. He remembers me like a good dream from years ago.
We talk about money and passion, the future.
The more hopeless I get, the more enthralled he seems.
I get more and more corporeal until I ache from skin to spine
while he becomes a ghost I can see through without ever even wanting to.
There was a power in this for me when there was no other power to be found.
But now that I've moved people with sentences far simpler than these
he provides no solace or amusement, no victory for me.