FUNHOUSE BLUE
“On a beau se couvrir et recouvrir de masques, les farder, les regarder” - Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus “In vain, we cover ourselves over and over with masks, painting them, gazing at them”
I’d turn the corner
and find you,
yr cherry robitussin grin
and lorazepam lullabies
moaning in the sink,
and locking eyes
you’d read me pages
and pages
of lyric manifestos
They have given us nothing
but the silver back
of a mirror and
the unyielding blue
of skyscrapers,
you’d say,
and I
long
as the day is wide
These nights
when we’d meet in the fog
and go for a walk in the house
with no name
The one with the hidden room
everyone forgets
so the fish are always drowning
in algae
These months neglected aquariums
and greenhouses trouble your mind
Your severe talismans
feathered lipstick
and fish bellies‒
and here I was wondering
if maybe it was our smell
that drew them
to us
like something caught in the drain
it came from beneath
the sink!
Green claw to your throat—
the boxes are empty,
Schrödinger’s cat has left
the building
and even Freddy Krueger
knows you change the forms
in dreams
Do you remember
the bloody basements,
blood on the dancefloor
There is nothing left here
in the cabinets of lost glamour
haunted chiffon
nightgowns
and puce moments slip
down the spiral
staircase
One mirror opens, another closes
We know there is a way out of this tunnel
We consult the bibliography
of conversations
where Beebo Brinker winks at us
from the shadows
of the twilight world
Beneath the lights
at the
⛤V
⛥A
⛥P
⛥E
⛥Z ⛥O ⛥N ⛥E
Cherry cherry boom boom
The clasp of a necklace
boils over
smattering the floor
boundless billiards
in my bed of beads the scheming
chaos
of blue scuff marks
And when I get home
I huff the sweat stained sheets
of a repressed boyhood
curls cropped close
to the skull
to approximate
belief
I swish my listerine
as Poly Styrene serenades
my germ free adolescence
Chuis dans les vapes
in the twists of vapor
where our fingers
converge
There will be months,
years even
where we do our makeup
together and paint our lids
funhouse blue
III. GARÇON MANQUÉ
Biographical Statement
Alex J. Cope (they/them) is a poet and translator based in Chicago. Previously, they lived in and around Paris, where they organized a multilingual queer and feminist reading series out of a dyke bar. They help organize a community writing workshop as part of the PO Box Collective's monthly Poetry Series. Work from their manuscript soft like a spider has appeared in publications such as Sixty Inches from Center, The Rumpus, Pilot Press London, and Hooligan Magazine.