Boys Don't Cry

By Nico Amador

​                 

On representation—
what if an actress plays a boy
and you already know the boy is dead, shot
and buried under the wrong name in Nebraska?

If this is the first time you see yourself on screen,

what future could that predict?

From a friend’s sofa, I watched Brandon’s murder

light up the room, tasted iron behind my teeth.

Call that intuition, a beginning
before the beginning took shape as a haircut,
a journal entry, a pair of new briefs, a crow

dropping an object onto a harder object
to break it open. In the gap between knowing
and becoming, the boy kept dying
but my conclusions drifted away from his death.

That’s the irony: violence is meant to end something

and rarely does. I didn’t learn its lesson.
His face looked like a storm cloud or a horse
who could outrun a storm. His body excited me.

When no one was looking I slipped my hand under

my shirt, imagined my chest flattened.
That I could press against another’s hard chest,

touch his thin shoulders. That I could fly like a horse.