Alamo Theory - Josh Bell

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of them hoping to enter me — to enter anyone —

      the way they thought I entered them,

      and the way I entered them was wishing

      I was somewhere else, or wishing I was

      the someone else who’d come along

      to enter me, which was the same thing. Love

      in battle conditions requires a broad

      taxonomy, queerness has its ever-more-visible degrees.

      Josh, I know you know what I’m talking about,

      you have the build of a stevedore. Which reminds me,

      as a child in Nanjing,

      I sculled the junks for my bread and I slept

      in a hovel along the Chiang Jiang River.

      I bred mice in a cage there who built their nests

      from the frayed rope I’d taken from the decks, and one spring,

      when the babies did not emerge, I lifted

      up the rock that hid them, and I found

      they’d grown together, fused with each other

      and the tendrils of the nest. I held them up, eleven blind tomatoes

      wriggling on a blackened vine. And now you come to me

      in this Chinese restaurant in Malibu,

      asking if you can help me. Please tell Circus Magazine I love them

      truly, and please pass Pamela this message:

      If you get back to Malibu by springtime, drop by the houseboat,

      and I’ll rock your ass as far as Cho-fu-Sa.

      Our days often ended and began

      with the sound of voices raised

      in song. Even after we murdered

      our friends and neighbors. Even

      after we brought the attention

      of our knives to the neighbors of

      our neighbors, until at last

      the neighborhoods fell silent

      and the cities quiet and the city’s

      city, the country then and next

      the country, until finally the moon,

      as if its own reflection, looked

      upon an Earth that we had emptied

      nearly back to Eden. Even then,

      in that silence that seemed almost

      a silence, sadly we were not

      alone. All we ever wanted was

      to be alone, to visit no one, to be

      visited by nothing. But even after

      we’d traveled to the nearby planets

      and relieved them of their voices,

      even after — and we all knew

      this was coming — we fell amongst

      each other, brother and sister,

      until only I survived, still I heard it,

      the universe subtracted of its skin

      and hair, and yet the sound

      of a voice, like someone singing

      in the hold of a sinking ship,

      unbidden and irrelevant, a fathom

      and a fathom deep, but never fading.

      Things start off well: I’m the warden and no one’s writing on the walls in shit. I encourage all inmates to grow a mustache like mine, a bit of sculpted punctuation curling beneath the nose, directing the reader of the face downward to the lips. With them, and to the fellow in the mirror, I say, “my sweat unbreakable you,” helplessly using the word sweat instead of sweet, the way a high-school girlfriend did once in a letter, writing “Sweatheart, are we still going to the jamboree?” We were not going to the jamboree, anymore, Sally Garrett. This morning, out by the smokestacks before school, Lisa Shields pulled a bent cigarette out of the left cup of her bra before fishing for her father’s Zippo lighter amidst the rubble of an ancient civilization forgotten in the chaos of a giant orange purse. I peek into the purse, around the rotating axletree of Lisa’s searching arm, past the anthropologists dusting for fingerprints on a greasy tube of lipstick, and see a scene from the future reflected in a silver hand mirror: my English teacher, Mrs. Little, sitting on her desk while she explains how it wasn’t her intention to pigeonhole me as a poor student, except instead of the word pigeonhole, which I know she means to use, she keeps saying cornhole, not recognizing her mistake: “I never meant to cornhole you,” she says, again and again, “It was not my intention to cornhole you,” until I am dizzy, and when her black Mary Jane drops from her left foot to the classroom floor, where it will never move again unless someone picks it up and runs with it, I pick it up and run. For twenty years I have kept this shoe incarcerated, in solitary confinement, in the deepest level of the prison. These days, when I fear a riot — shivs like needlefish in toilet after toilet, the shrieks of the pigeonholed bursting from the prison library — I descend the steps to take my visitation with the shoe, but try as I might, I cannot make it fit my dick. And it’s always at this moment, that standing close to me, before school, Lisa glances down at the ill-fitting shoe, then lights her father’s Zippo with a pop that also seems to bring to life a chainsaw somewhere in the subdivision behind us. “It seems you’re not Cinderella, after all,” she will go on to say to me, in the shadow of the smokestacks. But until she does, I stand there, preparing myself to believe her, thinking of the jamboree, Sweetheart, and planning the cruel mustache of the future.

      See the shining city on the hill? Most of their laws

      have to do with crops

      and sorcerers. City attractive

      as a first responder. City good at everything

      like the she-male. When the owl

      had a dollar bill inside of it,

      when the plague had yet to make

      its way to a theodicy, I stood on the steps

      of the courthouse, saying truly

      that sentiment is fear. Sexual partner,

      sometimes your address

      is your only remains. Sexual partner,

      gone to the outlying vineyards

      and the cellar invisible, gone

      into the whistle and the metal

      of the whistle. Meanwhile, my fellows, they tie

      my eyes to a rough-hewn board. They payroll

      my bones and rain their curses

      down upon me, as if a rain of come.

      Even those born before me

      shall outlive me. Even those born after me

      shall exceed my consequence.

      On the hill, a city, and in the city, a house.

      And someday you will all be sorry

      when you recall how carefully

      I closed each door behind me.

      We

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