The summer after Halley’s Comet swung do-si-do
around the solar system, I grew six inches,
and a local boy who helped us
bale hay on Saturdays
necked me behind the corn crib
like a fawn on a salt block,
his eyes too bright to deny.
My belly burned for days. After a week
in binoculars, the comet taught me
about sublimation and Kepler, spacetime
as distance too vast for virtue
or sin. For you are dust,
and to dust I offered
his roving hands
my hips. That night,
I read about perihelion
in our new encyclopedias,
how the sun never allowed the comet
to come too close. I learned
Newton’s third law could explain why,
weeks later, the boy called me
a faggot, crying
on the other end of the line,
another lonely body
whose core convects
with the same fire as mine,
thrust onto an oblong horizon.
PERIHELION by Ben Kline
