black non-monogamy lover
every where i go its too much to be one thing to be a fixed idea yet in motion
like gossip from a mouth a whisper from the grapevine for
the ears of those who want it most closer to death by age and drugs i’m
always surprised when i awake & the walls aren’t made of the same fire
that burns in the look of my lovers’ eyes when i first arrive
to their doors.
surely God had a hand in answering
the long wish
i hid under my tongue ignoring the saltiness as if it were the sweat
dripping from cruising in Sodom. working at Looking Glass in Chocolate City,
jacked in Atlanta or a grinder in the Bay
the sins of Gomorrah carve my being down to flesh
no matter who i lie down with there is no human to devour
only ribs–thighs–legs–breast–wings–head–heart–hole.
Cis-sexism Tennis on a Sunday Morning at Athol
You’re a man why are you hitting
the ball so hard at her
the black lady with her friend
asked when I got back to the baseline
I’m not sure if it was the grace in the toss
the yellow of the ball spinning under the endless
blue of the sky or the inward rotation
of the forearm to move from on edge to action.
But I did it the way Venus does on YouTube,
how Serena did it in the highlights,
yet still a man maybe it’s my beard
The bulge in my shorts that flops when I run.
Maybe it’s the lower range of my voice
when I yell come on after a winner,
the flatness of my chest
when I crash out after an unforced error,
or simply I’m less like her a woman
more like her friend.
Finally I looked over to the other court
confused pretending it’s the sun in my eyes
for the reason my face is scrunched up
instead of her not minding her fucking business.
Christian M. Ivey (he/they) is a black non-binary writer, editor, and art director from the eastside of Pontiac, Michigan, who works to interrogate the mundane to illuminate how blackness is overdetermined by social death through a triangulation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Afro-pessimism. They are the Digital Communications Specialist for the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and Co-Fiction & Art Editor for Anathema Magazine: Spec from the Margins. He has also guest-edited issue No. 28 of FIYAH Literary Magazine, themed on Belonging; HEXAGON SF MYRIAD Zine on kinship; and The Pleasure Issue of beestung. Christian’s work has been supported by Hurtson/Wright Foundation for Black Writers, Voodoonauts, The Watering Hole, Obsidian Foundation, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, PREE Studio, Under the Volcano, and more. You can read their work in or forthcoming: Baffling Magazine, beestung, Black Youth Project, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. They are on all socials @ageedubb.