Wren Hanks

The Pink Phone Call

I. 

Francis answered the Pink Phone 
                        in the hallway of cobalt           the night offered.           Hold me said Francis 

                        I want to be a forest         I want to be a hydrangea’s bruise. 

He hung up and thought about Leo    swallowing him,           a marble whirling
                        in the acid                   of his lover’s belly.        He received 

calls from the future                           though it hurt to           trip over them
twirling his finger                               in the wild rose cords    pearling with second-hand

sweat.   He could roam the palace      trying to figure out what to say
                                                          the next time the Pink Phone rang. 

All the elements of phone tag             between him there and me

on the ragged                                      illusioned earth.   Our saliva hopscotch
            and my human wounds           massaging his across space-time. 

➵ 

When you die and become a space prince all your wounds stay with you
like kisses. You become a cake-pink receiver of other wounds too– 

you churn them in your mind for centuries. When you die and become
a saint, you become a saint for everyone like you, Francis, and like you– 

We are bayonets and fungus. We are carousel horses and colony organisms 

building protein chains to heaven. We are queers rowing the hell upstream. 

(Leo leaves hologram stickers 

on the pillows of young queens                                    The future is trans

The future has trees )

Like you did once, I take my paddles dipped in diatoms.  

            I row the hell upstream. 

II. 

The Pink Phone is our extracellular vesicle 
            communicating across phylum and space-time. 

Here I am in 2021 drinking myself to tears 
calling out as if my safe valve 

will appear. 

I am writing the same poem over 
and in it the shelter animals I work with perish: 

Possums died. Kittens died, umbilical cords still dangling. 
Viral rabbits. Late-night seizures. Parasites shriveled in their hosts. 

In the shelter, I have a phone plan 
for the death threats and despair. 

I teach my staff to slam the phone 
into the receiver. 

This brings us pleasure, like orange scones 
and denying rescue groups purebred kittens. 

I come home to a frayed couch and I want 
to talk to someone I can only see 

in my mind-palace.
 

➵ 

Francis answers the Pink Phone 
            in the hallway flooded with kestrel-light.        Salted my blue              My voice a violet ledge

I breathe against his cheek Pushing Past

I breathe against his cheek The sound drowned out 

I felt the grief, but numbness crept into every cavity. I pulverize the grief. There, in the vets’ operating room, I watched the surgeon pull out a dog’s uterus, a “V” for victory over cell death; she made small cuts with a razor from a sanitized bag. 

A veil swims out of his mouth into the hall light                      dissolving. 
The backs of our throats clear. Deep in us, pink doves churn. 

The first time I kissed another man, we trailed into a restaurant together, salvina and choked river, and when he asked if he could kiss me, hair falling in our faces, and when he asked if he could kiss me, on the street in the cold with our gloveless hands wrapped around each other’s waists, all the way to a movie where he put his hands under my vest and whispered in my ear, I want you. I want a dove who will crush and bless me. Absolve me of what I cannot understand. 

Francis whispers his resolve to me now 
            spilling across Pink Phone wires           thorny with the bacterial wealth of angels             pooled like photons                  in the maws of stars 

we can’t yet see.

The Powder Room

who should step down from a crystal coach – James Merrill, “Charles on Fire”

The powder room provides opportunities 
            for genuflection           to blot & powder 
with kinetic intensity    &  then reflect 
           on the fractal growth     of hothouse ferns 

Men throw their towels wherever 
           a greased white cat        licks a plate 
Someone passes the setting spray 
            so his eyes        won’t racoon 

Sometimes a moment looms more tenaciously 
            than Francis means it to 
And Leo will pull the razzled stop tassel 

resetting the party to bubbles & mist

The powder room provides deep pressure 
             a walk-in bear skin hugs Francis until his dermis sighs
Leo courts him with swaths of lilac 
            blown through a bluetooth speaker 
Lilacs stretch to supra  An idle kiss in a walk-in fridge
            this bear was once        this hug 
(our Francis crushed into old keratin, himself and)
                                    the bear now is

The powder room genuflects itself inside 
            A crumbling palace of live oak 
                                                watchers and whale fall enthusiasts 

Francis lets genuine termites wheel 
             through front doors and fairy rings 
                                                  He forgets to close portals after sundown 

He cruises the full-stop hydrangeas 
            curtain calling              french & panicled           oakleaf & climbing
                                                          the tea of heaven                  lacecap & blue

The powder room cruises         Francis & Leo              our dreamboats
                        parting the lacecap        petaled curtain 
Francis sees sun in a gold-tendrilled cup           he asks the grass to protect Leo
                        the gentle room            to keep them 
You were born pain free                 Leo says           milky prisms move across his face
                        when he admits            I will always find you 

His mustache     a magnetic sensor        pulling them together 
The hydrangea gates flex outside of time           tremble themselves back into place 

Francis calls out invasive jewels              like themselves 
                          monk parakeets staking out neighborhood       suet trees 
the monk parakeets know          how to dip between realms 
            our princes        won’t make it past         the powder room window a fog 

I’m so proud         to be with you 
I’m so proud to be with you