Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump (from I Think I'm Ready to See Frank Ocean)

You called me your Jenny.
I asked if that made me
a whore and you the idiot,
which you didn’t find funny.

I was envisioning our lacquered
bodies adjoining in a language
we have finally grown up
enough to speak.

We could rap for hours:
into tape recorders, over
your mother’s kitchen island,
in bowls of shito and cod

fish and rice. You call me
out when years later I come
home and ask if “someone
will pass me the pepper,
please.” Sometimes I was

the whore and you were
the idiot. You threaten not
to let me eat it, as if I have forgotten
the taste of lightning or ash or you-

r Ghanaian mother’s nipple which,
I believe she sometimes used
to feed the both of us.
My fingertips and my lips still burn

[from the cigarettes].
There were times when my mother
begged yours not to
wash us in the same bath and she did

not listen, cleansing the cruel
Puritanical stench of our Middle-American
upbringing in sponges and bubble soap.
I think about how your hair

always smelled of anise. The bright pink
bud of your still-fresh circumcision,
I was too young to understand,
or understand why I remember this,

or why when your Ghanaian father finally tried
to hide our nakedness
from each other—as we grew older,
together, and too unashamed

—your mother called this wanderlust “showing off.”
Sometimes I was the whore.
When I fly in to visit your parents
you show up high, driving a black BMW,

raiding the French door refrigerator
for Swiss cheese and grass-fed milk. You lift
your lips to the carton, catch me
watching your arm flex into a murder

of crows, a million shattered shingles.
Lord, make me a girl.
So I can fly far,
far away from here,

from every away that led me far from this.
You are like a song in a broken
photograph. You say,
when I got married

it broke your heart, but I kept
asking my heart “Home,
where are you?” You drive back

to Baltimore for your girlfriend,
through the deer-scattered forest of the rest
of this country. I lay in the dark,
in your parent’s guest room,
wanting to touch myself

against the furniture, to feel like the roar
of a car engine between my legs,
but instead lay naked as a question
while I fall asleep knowing

every man that will ever touch me
will not be you,
no matter how fast I run
in my dreams.

Sometimes I was the idiot.
My phone is vibrating
at three am, are-you-still
-up?, although I haven’t

heard from you
in months and I almost think
you are wanting to say we’ve lost
someone. Still, at three am

what could a beautiful man have to say
that isn’t bad news. I’m not married
now. Maybe you’ve heard it. Maybe
you are drunk and Patrón

helps you pretend
you are a lion. I ask you a
bout the music
you are still trying to skin

around, a reason to make this story into
record, and in some small way I still believe
your heart-song is an elegy to the time
that grew between us—

like going from a beautiful child
to an awkward doll—and the wilderness
that fills everything else. Sometimes
you were the whore. You don’t call

for a year. The next time I see
you, we at your father and mother’s Ghanaian
dwelling, toasting the blessings
of a Middle-American upbringing

With Australian Shiraz and two Ivy League imported
cousins. I touch your perfect arm, branded
in a sleeve of ink
from the stint you did upstate.
When I ask you, you don’t

talk to me about any of it. You say I am
too removed, too unavowed to know
how your skin feels underneath, this world
you have put on in cuffs. Perhaps

you knew no other way to assimilate
than to be shackled by this country’s past
—this Middle-American upbringing. You are
its native son, its black boy

dressed in the suit of a man
uncertain what that means yet.
My fingertips and my lips still burn
from the past. These new lashes
upon your arm like the burn from
cigarettes.
Don’t you know you run my mind boy?
…running on my mind. Boy::

a picture of our first kiss
is still stashed in my childhood belongings.
We are at the Renaissance
fair. You are carrying a sword

and I, wear a princess crown. Sometimes
we were the idiots who believed the future
was just the past made naked
and whole, again.