When I get called straight at NYC’s Pride, you feel vindicated. You say “see.” You wonder why I cannot see what everyone else can see, that you exist simply because

my husband sneaks you butterscotch candies in crinkling packages from a damp pocket, you cheek them roughly against a dry cavity, afraid that if you say no, just once, he will never offer again. Sometimes I can see that you are soothed just because he wants so badly to soothe you. But you have lost your taste for hyperbole, for our own inclination toward exaggeration you gag, on the drama of it. Say you’re thirsty now. Need vitamin D. That you’re getting fatter than you want to be. And when I start crying near the Stonewall Memorial, people packed like tinned fish, I'm wearing a shirt from my East Texas university. The state’s iconic outline doesn’t show gerrymandered lines, just a heart roughly where my apartment is. A group asks where’s the parade? but it is loud, I barely hear them, and I don’t know where the parade is, was supposed to be, or might have already been. I say I’m not sure, am spat a scoff, fucking straights, ruining it for the rest of us. And you know better than most, gorging yourself on this moment, why they hate us southern queers. You recite that evil warning myth of us, mutter something about the humidity, I shoot back that humility is bred from having to admit that you were wrong, we know the motion of it better than most. You hiss something about coiled baby hairs at the nape our neck they can’t quite get a hold of while fucking us from behind, I tell you that letting me drip down your chin won’t satiate you this time I tell you that two things can be true at once. That fried chicken is good hot and cold all the same, that Grammie says we can get glad in the same pants we got mad in and Fried Green Tomatoes isn’t lesbian we’re all just like that down here we just don’t talk about it in church, the way tact and Bless Her Heart and you’re hungry again, tapping impatiently on the walls of your enclosure in my chest. I tell you yes, too, the need to write a poem about sapphic sex strikes mid-cooking dinner for my husband. Yes, you remind me, my husband. Yes, kiss girls in my dreams. Yes, hold their hands in bars. The way that I have shoved you down the mouth of every body, as if stuffing the gullet of another is the same thing as feeding you. The way Grammie let us lick the brownie bowl clean, eggs and all but made us wash our hands with bleach.