after Terrance Hayes

I meet her at the bar on Lower East — it’s both our favourites since Hippolytus took us 
in one of his less chaste moods. There are pin-ups in the bathroom and a neon sign 
saying something like well-behaved women rarely make history. Phaedra confirms

the rumours: she joined her ex in exile, found love in his perpetual repent. She won 
an award that made him respect her, got a job and washed his dog and learnt to cook meat 
in ways that impressed. She says you may not understand it, 

but people resolve these matters in all sorts of ways. Some things are private, the sole remit 
of a man, a woman and the dark. Phaedra orders us negronis. When she pays 
on his Amex, I see how money changes everything. In my mind it’s

three years ago and I’m bent double over the pin-up bathroom sink, dress hiked above 
my hips. She knows how we became liquid at that touch. Returned our floppy bodies 
to their absent patriarchs. A Daddy is a Daddy, after all. So far from home 
	
and unspooling with abandon; sugar rotting us like fruit unto alcohol, aged in barns 
upstate.  Wind blowing through the peach fur. I say Phaedra, I want to be a woman 
immaterial, but I am just an animal with a slack, hungry mouth.