matthew shepard martyr magic or (msm)m by Sam Sax

before they pen your name into law
and erase the last byrd on earth
i hear you were a boy.

though their throats often cast
childhood like faggot into
brimstone.

those 22 years of dying
could be called experience.

for we are forever children and childless
in the dagger eyes of our peers
who swing gavels like bas ball bats
at our swagger.

i hear you held your lovers like we held our tears.

maybe because it was wyoming
and white on fences is supposed to be normal.

because we thought that a queer
in that railroad town shoulda stayed
in the back of their shotgun house.

cause you were young and living
you were alive
and had my brothers name

or maybe
because you looked like i.m told america.s supposed to

passing through your gas station strip
of a city (like I did once)
i saw through my window
crosses lining the highway like
paint.

and i realized that straight is work.
this is why we have to demolish
mountains to lay down the shame
of our interstates.


why the train-tracks of your
teeth mirrored the that fence
where you were chained.

and why your father wore a
bullet proof vest to your
funeral service with only
purpose of speaking your name.

and i imagine
it was you who carried these
crosses and left them scattered
like byrd by the side of
road.

wood boxes
sunk into earth like coffins.

what does martyrdom feel like?

is it that ton of bricks weighting down
this mass of your veins?

did you cast off these crosses
from your back like the names
of the dead trapped under your slim
sickly shadow?

carry in your boardinghouse chest
a subway in Brooklyn
a classroom in Oxnard
a police station in Memphis

paint six hundred million stories
onto your tongue and
speak like you meant it

mummer this sentence
to those hidden within
the cold lifeless folds
of your whiteness.

You will say.

“I have danced with disco ball eyes.

held a fifteen year old boy by his waste
and lifted him toward the sun
like a dusty compass.

that same sun which rose crimson across
the horizon of this eyelid left me as
I found my direction.

found we.ve found beautiful.
we are beautiful
in the ugly of our imperfection

for it is I who am forever
child and childless
in the sex of my adolescence.

dress me fly.

make up my tongue a dance floor
so our broken stories can dance
more like stilettos than wet eyes.”

and i realized that
two thousand years ago
my village mourned
the death of a boy who died
before his time.

and nineteen hundred and ninty-nine
years later my grandfather said to me
"when they come for you, samuel,
they will know who you are."

so i.ve been waiting.
to be told by them
who will speak
what i am tattooed
to my arm.

if i offered you my palm.
hot, sweaty and young.
matthew.
would you wait with me?