By Kenny Mitchell
Can’t stop gnawing on you, brittle nails from dying days.
Can’t stop watching you, queer teenage love story from
a pulseless past I’ll never revive. Can’t help but remember
the boy sitting next to me in middle school science and his complaints
regarding the clamor that echoed in my mouth as I chipped
away at my claws. I was always the kid running his hand
along the plaster walls, a whoosh following my fingertips, and
I am a whoosh wailing with no rhythm. An alliteration annoying
everyone. I am a rusty faucet with a faulty spigot dripping, can’t stop
echoing annoying in my head, and I stop biting nails for the cute boy
in science, and I conceive a future where I’ve changed enough to earn
these blissful giggles and playful closeness of queer teen love stories.
And my grandfather asks if I’m seeing anyone, and I have to say
no, and I’m reminded that I’ve written hundreds of lines my family
will never read. And I am in danger of writing an epic where heroes
don’t go to die but, rather, can’t stop thinking about how they aren’t living.
Can’t stop writing poems where queer kids are sad, and I’ve tried writing
joy, I swear, and I can write joy, hope even! I swear! But my joys are always
rust-lined, dripping, echoing “but this and this and this,” and this is the
hardest it’s ever been to be a leaky faucet, to be an adult who still
trickles fingertips along the wall, still bites his claws to nubs.
I can’t imagine claws as necessities, never learned to use them, even when
I needed them. And I only tell lies when I feel like I’m burning, but leaky faucets
can’t catch flame, can’t burn in silence, so I keep writing, keep spouting out
the truth: can’t stop writing about everything. About biting-things and queer
teenage lust. About needing noise and finding a place to hide. About heroes
and living and dangerless claws. And I’ll keep writing about leaky faucets.
Kenny Mitchell (He/Him) is an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, The Airgonaut, JAKE, The Gorko Gazette, and The Good Life Review. He is also the co-editor-in-chief of Do Geese See God? Literary Magazine. Kenny drinks (inhales is a better word) an obscene amount of coffee and has been described as “the world’s most violent typist.” He (semi-occasionally) tweets @kennymwrites.
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