As a Boy

Once, in middle school, I looked
at a girl in a way that made her cry.
She stood limp and tried to peel
her soul away from her flesh
and shrink down inside of it
like a moth in a suit of armor.
I never saw her cry, but when
she stood up again inside herself
and felt the sleeves of her arms,
the obscene stuff they were now
made of, she could only have cried.

By the time the teacher sat me down
I knew I was bad. He made me speak
through my suit of armor and promised
to tell my parents. Of course they should know.
I’d been through grade school in the eighties.
I expected this to happen one day.
History is a time line of wars, horror,
and men. History moves fastest
with men in charge and flesh
feeding the prairie. We draw the maps
and count the bodies and write
the paragraph about Amelia Earhart.
We use our bodies against bodies–
enemy bodies, female bodies, foreign
bodies, and we leave the soul behind.
This was my beginning. I was a boy
ready to join the history of men.
I closed my dangerous eyes and tried
to imagine what terrible thing I would become.