Euh-Loh-Gie
Like Eu-Lah-Gie
Like you lodged complaints against a school board who didn’t care
About boys
Who unable to see your beauty made you over in masochistic Maybelline
Like you logged hours alone in your room
As tears cut silent grand canyons down the sides of your face
Until you couldn’t take it anymore.

But when a mother opens a closet door
to find her teenage son
swinging from a colored shoelace
windpipe crumpled
like magnetic knuckles against his iron face

her first thought
is not of social pressure, or the stuffed in lockers
or the boys he’s loved before.
She only cries

, and heaves herself hard enough to clap back thunder.
And slowly,
almost as slowly as time will scratch you from her memory,
she recovers.
And she learns to carry the weight of your absence
Like a cross on Capitol Hill.

But what did you think as you softly knotted a rainbow around your neck?
And as rope fibers began making love to your skin cells
did your bruises heal?
Were your coal eyes somehow lightened?
And in that last moment did you cry for yourself
Or the world

Like I did when I asked myself
How many times
didn’t I ask.
Not provide a place, or a time
or a world to tell.
How many times did I not sling your arm around my broad shoulders
when I saw you
broken down
like closet doors.

How many times
Will we look past those
left lacerated by rusty rainbows
seeing only the insecurities
that we have yet to admit
to ourselves.

What to be said
of your executioners?
Will we
spin crocodiles’
tears into lunchroom eulogies?
Or
for once
peel away our letterman skins
rough like middle fingers and Proposition 8
or as unflinching as don’t ask don’t tell
and see the ugly inside?