BOYSTUFF 1&2
Your mustache makes me want to take a seat.
I watch your collarbone where sweat and sun
collect, expand, and wrap in pools around
your freckled redwood neck and vowel tongue.
Recall the clever quotes prayer for change;
I’ll stretch my canines towards your ears.
I get off blurting truth.
I kissed a married man and it felt good.
He asked and I said yes and then I hoped
somehow you’d see and be impressed
by how little my body meant when it mattered.
With long and lighted strides we make
a promise to be wrong and loved
regardless. Pretty boy, I’m waiting here.
Regardless, pretty boy, I’m waiting here
while Summer makes a moron out of me.
My drooling tongue has picked up gulls and cans
and dunes. I’m a hamster on a wheel,
a three-song playlist on repeat,
a half-baked metaphor in pricy sunscreen.
The waste bin’s full of crusty tissues cracked.
Invasive birds eat all the lavender,
and still, my stupid, spigot soul pours out
and drowns you in these poems crying love
and yearn and want. We’re due to bridge the space
between our God and horizontal time,
but God is just a horse inside a maze
all trapped and doomed to bray, cry, and kick.
VERTICAL STRIPES
Look at you in that Carhartt shirt:
your sunburnt sternum, your songbird neck.
So obnoxious. I’m just
supposed to sip this mocktail?
I lean into you and become more myself.
Your dog swims after our friend:
three poets mark the trees with piss and laughter.
You meet my eyes and cut me a feeling.
The hours stretch ugly without you.
You hold a water snake as though he were a feather.
He wiggles between your knuckles
and flicks his tongue of mischief.
Humidity and love poems are sisters,
lilting their wrists and calling us in from the porch.
We tell them we’ll be right there;
we’re too busy licking each other’s foreheads.
I ask you to spit into my blue plastic cup
so I can swallow you in public.
Biographical Statement
Philip Kenner (he/they) is an NYC-based poet and playwright from New Rochelle, NY. His chapbook, BOYSTUFF, is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in 2025. His poems and plays are published in Colectivo Tabú, Milk Press, poetry.onl, Cordite Poetry Review, and Kitchen Table Quarterly, among others. He is a founding member of COPY Magazine, and he has an MFA from Northwestern University. philkenner.com