poem

The Archangels Sharpen Their Blades

by Daniel Brennan

 for G.

Name a king more cruel than God.

We are told that this is the end, but how often have you heard that fable?

In your hand: the remnants of last night’s nightingale: his tempered body,

how we made him sing for us! Or perhaps

only a paper crane’s feeble bones, the imitation of heat.

Most nights, we struggle to tell our supplemental lovers apart from love,

their feathers littered across the floor. Tonight, though, blood song

squelches like pulped fruit between your fingers.

I watch your fingers coil and release like talons, as if you know

it is too late now to turn back.

Your hands: such instruments of pleasure, but often rage.

When you kiss me, this rage becomes gift. This rage,

my tongue nursing its native sweetness.

My viper of a tongue, raiding the nest. Must I coerce yours into prayer?

I’d beg you to keep faith, but in who?

You are witness once again: a homeland’s borders now ink,

smeared under the storm’s thick tongue; you can’t unsee how they are

flushed into the margins, those gray & calamitous mouths, calling your name.

We spend more time pretending,

as if we do not to hear the clicking bills of warbirds, or smell

Eden’s napalmic perfume as they rend open its throat like a clementine’s skin.

At night, amen, our building still stands on its last legs. It lasts.

Our city so far removed from your youth’s tall shadow,

from the streets that once carried your father, and his father,

to wild groves held together like stone-struck glass.

We do not wait, held in silence, listening for

the whistle of an archangel’s body as it falls blade-first upon us.

You tell me: you merely watch, you cannot know my grief

and I do not protest because I know you’re right and

at night, I watch as your body tightens with disbelief.

Forgive me for knowing so little, for all the faces you say you’re forgetting.

Distance, emptying your mouth of their names. Your hands in fists.

Kiss me & fill me & bless me with your rage. Break this bread with me. 

Our God is too busy sacking kingdoms to stop you from such overreach,

our lips swollen with fury. Where there is fury, you say, there, too, is guilt.

I shut out the dark, & the concussive croon of ruin. Amen.

The men, their bodies taut & filled with rage.

Filled with how much longer can this last?

Your warm body is a citadel tonight in our bed; as you sleep, my lips

drink in your sweat, pressed to your back. Tongue

keeping track of your vertebrae and muscle. My nightingale,

my songbird woven from vestigial wounds. Your rage filling me with heat.

Hand gripping your flesh, I wonder what sort of God would dare

destroy something so sacred? I wonder if one day he’ll show us.

---

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer, romantic, and coffee devotee from New York City. When not working his day job in advertising, he can be found in the trenches of queer nightlife (producing and attending more events than his sleep schedule would prefer . . . ). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net and has appeared in dozens of publications, including The Penn Review, Sho Poetry Journal, and Trampset.