Charlie Coleman
​

SESTINA FOR LAWRENCE V. TEXAS


So it goes like this: when the police entered the apartment
and saw, their reports differed on the kind of sex
the men were having. A bow with arrow taut and a hand
fisted in a cream sheet. In a downtown office, a lawyer in a purple tie
filed certiorari and goes back to bed for his lunch hour.
Everywhere in the country there are orifices waiting to emit light.

After a month of birth and twenty years, I wake to your body flayed by light.
You were my gilded morning, crashing in our friend’s tiny apartment.
Today, it’s the mark where your legs meet your hips and the long hour
we spent over coffee and yogurt. You suggested we have sex
in that furnace of an estranged room, our friend at work, boxers and ties
sizzling on the floor, my fervent yes and your miraculous cold hands.

The Attorney General of Texas refused and the DA blew their hand,
but it was just electioneering, the firm press of a tailor, steps taken light.
On the marble and the concrete, this was the culture war, and it ended in a tie.
While I wailed in Maryland innocence, there were Dupont Circle apartments
drooping full of other lives in expat cities, weeping for sex
with ghosts, a cowboy from a dream, a man meeting you in the park on the hour.

When I decide to go missing and celebrate the hour,
I think of that little mesh number and thighs and a hand,
slowly caressing, opening up a thunderstorm. We had sex
just once, after the club. My whole life is spent under this piercing light--
no one older or younger. Later, when I share a one-bedroom apartment,
I remember in a flash: when your song came on you pulled me to the floor by my tie.

The scorned lover from the original story had stepped outside to loosen his tie
and buy a soda. He called the police, and two years later the hour
turned sharp—when he died they never solved the case. Furniture into the apartment
and gold into silver, another margarita into his hairy hand,
and that was it. He damned them to fines and misdemeanors, how light
a sentence for courtly love, to forget the number but never the sex.

In the grain of my basement we talked about Foucault and all the sex
we still need to have. Back then it was still the matter of how to tie
yourself up and find new ways to escape. When we saw the light
and the angry texts from your mom, the nausea of the hour
left you to walk home alone. I set to forgetting the canal of your hand
opening to the sea of my chest, salt under the floorboards corroding the apartment.
​
On the first day of the first year we had sex in our first apartment.
The green velvet couch was heaving through its ties and you offered me a hand.
It is the birthday of our bodies in the light: the fleshy slap of the clock striking the hour.

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Charlie Coleman is a writer based in New York City studying English at Columbia University. His work has previously been published in Quarto Magazine, ANGLES, and ZENIADA. His writing is often inspired by his interest in philosophy, theatre, literary theory, and his dedicated love of people-watching.