The Body

forgotten,
in the back of the room.

shoulders hunched forward,
eyes wide open,
a slight bend on the right knee.

men called it a group project
and look at it now, a dried-up model,
gathering dust.

its flesh,
once unmarked,
now indicates:
rough terrain;

two scars lay beneath its breasts,
a gash between its legs,
a whirring sound can be heard
when the mouth is opened.

pretty tool, empty vessel
small enough to stow away,
used enough to ignore:

only basic maintenance required

Ιn Which Achilles Is a God & a Cannibal

And this is how it always goes; the story.
A man holds another man & turns to ash,
boys grow up at the first taste of blood;
there are ghosts everywhere, waiting
for fresh blood, for the taste of pretty boy
between their fake gums, full of spite.

Boys only need two things: warmth & spit
which means you already know the story
& how it ends, naturally: one plus one boy
only makes one & a spare canister of ash,
foreshadows tragic sorrow, just wait
for that inevitable hunger at first blood.

And it’s only natural to like how blood
falls heavy on the tongue, how, unlike spit,
it makes the world move slow & the waiting
impossible; the lust for wrong flesh is a story
that always ends in the same way: w/ ash
everywhere & Achilles wailing want&want&boy.

Achilles always knew he was just a boy
in search of another. He did not know bloody
flesh would taste so good; young lovers think ash
is just a conspiracy theory, they’ll be good w/ spit.
But it was the gods that wrote this story
& they have spent far too long waiting.

Patroclus went years unnoticed, waiting,
not knowing he was searching for a boy-
god to love; that they’d write the story
Alex would hide under his pillows, that blood
would be easy to offer to the mouth, spit
the path to eros, flesh willingly turned to ash.

When a boy wants a half-god, he becomes ash.
Fucking & normal dinners are just a waiting
room farce, a honeymoon of using spit
until hunger catches up. Then two pretty boy
bodies merge in one, ghosts delight in the blood,
& then there’s only one, who repeats the story.

In this story, you spit on the inside of a god
& he is just another boy waiting for love that
turns, & blood-hungry, kisses your ashy mouth.

Alex Visalo Rainers is an undergraduate student at the School of English in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Its research interests revolve around queer theory and contemporary American poetry, with a special focus on online transgender poet communities. He has been published in Honeyfire Literary Magazine and a Sunday Mornings Poetry Press poetry anthology. In their poetry, they focus on queer identity, queer history, and the body.